


In My Ten Years

by brittlelimbs



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Baby Rey, Caretaker Ben, Codependency, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Hurt/Comfort, Kid Ben, Obsessive Behavior, Oral Fixation, Possessive Behavior, Soul Bond, Soulmates, luke/han if you squint
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-28
Updated: 2018-03-23
Packaged: 2018-05-16 18:31:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 24,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5836267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brittlelimbs/pseuds/brittlelimbs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a piece of Jedi mythology, passed down from ancient times, that tells of a peculiarly nasty phenomenon: one singular, intact soul split in two by the Force. It's a story of a schism in the stars, a constellation cracked in half, a lifetime spent scouring the Universe in search of that elusive whole.<br/>But the Force is cruel and kind in turns; it gave Ben only one piece of his soul, but left the other, swaddled, at his feet. </p><p>AKA my take on the "Ben and Rey grow up together!" trope with a soulmate/soulbond twist. Pretty much pure teeth-rotting fluff, lots of Ben being a lil mother hen etc. before they grow into a romantic relationship. Luke POV.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Luke Skywalker’s nephew is a quiet boy. His uncle has always been a little wary of this, of Ben’s silent broodings, the way that his other padawan’s joy seems to extinguish in the space around him when they get too close. He’s a solitary kid, and Luke can’t quite puzzle out why—he can’t see Han’s braggadocio, nor Leia’s fire, in the way Ben keeps to himself, wringing his hands inside his robes and pacing like the galaxy’s tiniest old man, hunched by the weight of the worry on his shoulders. What he could be worried about, Luke hasn’t the faintest. Stars—the boy is only nine, yet his Force signature trembles with an anxiety that takes Luke hours to sooth through placid meditation, smoothing his hand across Ben’s mind in great, broad, strokes, until all of the frothy chops and ripplings of him melt into sea-calm. He’s been training for about six months, and though the decades have given Luke patience, he can’t help the idea that maybe this turbulence is innate. Maybe this isn’t the path that the Force has given Ben, no matter how much Skywalker runs in him.

 

Then, one day without warning, the Force changes. It’s only a tiny corner of the rich, shivering tapestry of it, but something feels righted, like a thread that was once knotted and tangled made to be unerringly straight once more. At that precise moment, Luke’s on the quad, coaching his pupils through their rudimentary saber techniques in golden light of late afternoon. He’s watching Ben. The boy’s form is good, though each fainted block and parry is wrought with the heaviness of the mind; he’s overthinking the fight. Luke watches him pause for a moment, lowering his humming blue blade to tuck away one perpetually loose strand of dark hair, and then resume the two-handed grip, raising his saber in preparation for a _makashi_ slice—

The Force shifts with a _twang_ like a blood-hot muscle spasm, deep in the back of Luke’s mind. _What?_ After reeling for a moment, Luke minutely shakes his head, plants his boots more firmly into the dirt, purposeful not to let his students see that something has nudged his calm. He’ll meditate on this later.

When he looks up, to his surprise, Ben has lowered his blade again, extinguished it; he looks odd standing there, so static in a blitz of blue and green, the kinetic whirl of many robes.

Then his nephew turns to him, and Luke takes a tiny, but perceptible, step back. The wisdom in those strange black eyes is like nothing he’s ever seen. And then, while Luke stands transfixed, something even stranger happens:

Ben smiles.

“Do you feel it, too?” He asks Luke, the sound of his voice barely audible over the fizz and whine of twenty sabers ignited at once. But Luke hears it, the tone of one who’s caught a star in their bare hands, awed and uncertain.

In that moment the boy is painfully young and _beautiful_ , dappled, a mix of gritty dust and tree-shade and pre-adolescent sweat. Ben wipes the droplets from his forehead as he gazes at his uncle, beaming widely as if to say, _It is I, the creature who swallowed the sun!_

It’s unsettling, but slowly, Luke nods.

 

From that day on, it’s as if Ben is a different person, all bubbling laughter and eagerness. Luke watches him socialize with the others for the first time, joining them in their little crosslegged circles at meals, telling excited stories and gesticulating wildly as his dinner cools in his lap. They don’t seem to mind his sudden change; they’re children after all, and grudges come and go with the days as they pass.

Ben’s begun to develop his own specific texture, and it’s in this time that Luke learns most about his nephew. Where once there was a flat, unreadable horizon, now emerges a wondrous and diverse geography: likes, dislikes, fascinations, revulsions.

Ben loves tinkering with machines.

Ben hates mutt-fruit.

Ben could study the clicking, jewel-backed insects of their island for an entire morning and never, ever, tire of it.

The tectonics of life are just beginning to erode him down, push him up, into the craggy peaks and valleys that discern a complete person, and Luke watches as raptly as he can, this changing day by day. It’s riveting.

 

On the day Rey comes, Ben’s been training under him for almost a year and a half. It’s raining. The droplets are fat and tangy with the taste of minerals, sliding down Luke’s cleft as he dons his hood and quickly heads towards the tiny vessel that’s alighted in the clearing. His robes are turned stiff and soaking as he sloshes through puddles, watching the gangplank extend into the soft muck of the earth with a shaft of yellow light.

All at once he senses someone behind him, and he turns:

“Ben! What are you doing?”

The boy is shivering, robes wrapped tightly around his narrow shoulders, rainwater dripping from his wet-black curls. He only stares at the ship in answer. He has that odd look in his eyes again, that gaze of an ancient being Luke finds so disturbing. Then there’s the sound of boots on metal, and, with reluctance, Luke looks back to see two figures emerging from the light of the belly of the beast. One of them is carrying a bulk in its arms, which Luke knows must be the Force-sensitive. He’s expecting it; this is not the first baby he has taken in.

Without much fuss, the pair come forwards. The man hoists the baby in his arms upon Luke, who carefully shifts the bundle to sit safely inside the crook of his elbow. “Her name is Rey,” the other nurse says as he adjusts the wrappings, using a finger to brush the linens from her red and wrinkled face. A name. That, he was _not_ expecting, but the surprise is a pleasant one—the sound of it is bright and simple, and reminds him of hope. Luke likes it immediately.

He looks up to the nurses, who are shielding their faces against the whipping rain. “Thank you,” he says, nodding to them, feeling the warm thrum of the Force cocooned around this tiny being in his arms. _You have done a great service to the Light, bringing her here._

They nod in return, then head back to the shelter of the vessel. Luke turns to head back to the compound, but then is abruptly reminded of his other pressing concern, as he nearly trips over it: Ben. The boy is more thoroughly soaked than before, hood plastered to his head and shoulders, but somehow he’s more radiant.

“Can —can I see her?” He asks with uncertainty, peering up at the bundle with a mixture of excitement and fear, as if Luke will whisk the baby away from him at any second.

Luke is rather taken aback. “Ben, I—how about we wait until we’re back home? It’s not good for a baby to be outside in weather like this.”

Ben considers him for a moment, rainwater dripping from the tip of his nose, and then he nods; though disappointing, this decision appears to be satisfactory enough.

 

Rey wakes up on their return trip and starts to cry, her healthy wails echoing through the wet forest and making the birds titter with the sound. Luke quickens his pace.

 

When everyone is clean and dry, and Rey’s screams have mellowed into little discontented cries, Luke calls Ben over to his bunk. He’d been waiting very patiently, a shadow by the doorway, watching his uncle remove the outer layers of rough wool from the bundle, leaving only the soft linens beneath.

He sits on the edge of the bed beside Luke, tips of his toes barely skimming the ground as he swings them, and stares at Rey. She’s clearly more interesting than any shiny bug or gadget; the boy can hardly look away.

“Would you like to hold her?” Luke asks, voice a deep rumble.

Ben looks up at him with wide eyes, as if he had never considered the possibility of being able to touch something as delicate and perfect as her. He nods vehemently.

With careful hands, Luke shifts Rey into Ben’s arms, showing him how to properly support her head and keep her tiny body close. Ben listens raptly, nodding more as he learns.

When Luke’s hands finally fall away from their adjusting, so do Rey’s cries; all at once, she’s completely silent in Ben’s arms, slit eyes upturned towards his face as if they were actually able to focus.

Ben smiles down at her in return with this incredible, wise benevolence, and Luke’s struck by the intense privacy of this moment. He, the adult, feels like he shouldn’t be witnessing this.

Ben leans into the bundle, body curling around the baby, and Luke watches him gently nose against against her tiny brow, her round cheeks and chin, her puckered mouth. Rey giggles, a wonderful sound. Finally, Ben appears content, and simply rests his forehead against hers, his still-soaking hair wilting into a slow, dark curtain against the pink of her.

“I was waiting,” he breathes, and it’s so quiet that Luke’s not entirely that Ben knows he spoke. Ben’s eyes slowly close, and he just lays there for a moment, basking, completely oblivious to his uncle sitting starstruck by his side; the Force is _exultant_ , shimmering and flexing in joyous ways Luke hasn’t felt in years-- no— _decades_ , not since his father had asked to look upon him with his own eyes, had renounced his Darkness. Ben and Rey are burning bright with a slurry of medichlorians and thermal energy, hard to look at, impossible for human hands to touch. They’re siphoning off the very lifeblood of the planet through their bodies, Luke realizes, though he’d have to be dead not to feel it; even just the fine, golden shed that’s granulating off the surface of their skin is potent enough to make him feel ten years younger by doing nothing more than sitting _near_ it.

It’s baffling. He’s never seen anything like it. And yet, as he sits there, witness to these two small god-beings as they bend the very fabric of the Force, Luke can’t help but feel the rightness of it. _Perhaps_ —he gingerly strokes his mind against the warmth, gauging it. _Yes, it fits_.

Luke quietly moves from the bed to the hard dirt of the floor, crosses his legs, and takes the first few deep breaths as he slips into meditation. Ben and Rey hum onwards, blissful, oblivious; there is no world outside their bond.

 

Ben comes to him a few weeks later, a wide band of soft cloth in his arms.

“Could this carry her?” he asks, proffering it to Luke. “Would it be… safe?”

Luke brushes a hand over his lips, hiding his smile. Ben must be getting tired of his daily trips to the makeshift nursery, flitting in and out like a dark sparrow, giving Rey sweet kisses on her tiny hands, talking to her, leaving little baubles on top of the locker near her sleeping mat— _so she doesn’t eat them_ , he says.

Luke had caught him sleeping with her one night. He was checking on Rey, having been awoken by her burbling Force signature. She was awake when he came, blinking slowly into the humid night and cooing on her mat, while Ben lay slumbering around her, utterly lax, sides rising and falling with the deep breathing of rest. One of Rey’s fists experimentally flexed open and closed around the boy’s curled index finger, as if she were testing the corporeality of him; Luke felt a pang at the thought of separating them, though it was his duty. He had cast a midnight web of Force-sleep over the two, a velveteen blanket spangled with the ionic dust of dreams, and gently scooped his nephew up, took him back to his bunk. That was the first of a handful of similar incidents, but—well, Luke still can’t quite find it in him to tell Ben to stop, no matter how much sleep he loses. The ritual has quickly become routine, the clicks and calls of the night beasts a gentle familiarity, the blue night a comfort around him and the boy in his arms.

Now, he helps Ben fashion a sling of sorts as he holds a drowsy Rey, wrapping the swaths of cloth up and around small shoulders until it holds the girl tight against his chest.

Luke might’ve given the boy robes of rich brocade, a whole bolt of the finest H’nemthe silk, the way he runs his hands up and down the coarse material stretched taught over Rey’s back, mouth open in wonder. Luke blinks; Ben’s projecting, though he doesn’t know it:

_He’s holding her to his chest, and it’s the strangest feeling-- his heart, his nut-brown, exhausted little heart, is beating healthily outside his ribs and it’s the most natural thing in the world._

The moment is broken as Ben returns to his senses.

“Thank you. Thank you, uncle!” He cries, coming close to hug Luke carefully around the bundle that is Rey, surrounding her with roughspun robes and Skywalker.

At this, Luke can’t help but smile outright. A Jedi is not heartless, after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahh I know I should be working on Thaw but I couldn't help myself!!
> 
> Comments very welcome.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jumping through time in Rey and Ben's childhood together.

More weeks pass, and Rey greatly approves of the sling, as communicated by an excess of toothless smiling and pulling on Ben’s curls. Both Luke and Ben quickly realize, however, that Rey wants to take in the world head on, that she wants to be _forwards_ , and changes are quickly made to accommodate this; now her back sits snugly against his chest, giving her access to wave her chubby arms and investigate the world that’s slowly coming into focus before her. The other children laugh at this— _Ben’s a ship and Rey’s the pilot!—_ but their interests are more piqued than their unkindness. The teasing quickly fades to hums of curiosity, questions.

_Does she have any teeth?_

_Can she talk yet? When will she talk?_

_Do you have to change her diaper? Ugh!_

Though Ben answers these questions with all of the austere gravity of a senator ( _Not yet,_ _No, but soon,_ and _Yes, I do_ ), Luke watches the younger children marvel, while others knit their brows in confusion at this strange, alien melancholy; some of them still remember the idea of mothers. That sweet warmth is still fresh on their skin, lingering from a planet so far away that its only denomination in their island’s sky is a hundredth-degree of measurement, tucked behind a star. Ben’s love is a love they left behind, were taken from, and it’s the strangest little sting in such young hearts.

The other ones just never knew a mother in the first place. The way Ben smooths Rey’s whispy hair from her forehead is, in their glittering eyes, nothing but an exciting strangeness, and they’re eager to watch.

Mother-memories or no, they all love Rey; she’s the only baby of the family, after all, and everyone spoils her with a collective joy that has them vying for her attention, her smiles.

They bring her squirming offerings clutched in stained fists, crowns of dewflower and twigs, as if to do nothing more than see how she’ll react. She’s bestowed a million titles in tongues that only children know: one afternoon, she is declared Lord of the Earth Worms, another, Queen Discerner of Shade-Napping. Luke sighs as he watches his padawans make beach pebbles Force-dance for her entertainment, though his eyes are kind; _as if Ben wasn’t enough_! She has the entire compound twisted around her impossibly tiny, perfect pinky finger.

But, beneath it all, his nephew is always there. He’s the one who knows when she’s getting too exhausted, can gauge the intensity of the other children’s love and know when it’s just too much. The one who knows her not only when she’s the immaculate Rey, Keeper of Fish, but also when she’s Rey, The Soiled and Cranky. He takes each part of her in turns, the good and the bad, and returns nothing but all the love a ten-year-old can give. It’s a love that’s a little wobbly, knock-kneed and new, a little too intense sometimes, but an abiding one all the same.

 

Though he’s only allowed to carry her briefly at first, Luke watches the two of them quickly adjust to life together, bound to each other. By the time she’s reached six months, she spends more time on Ben’s chest than on the ground, or even on the sleeping mat—in Luke’s opinion, at least. Ben couldn’t be happier.

Luke watches them at their simple meals as they learn a type of quiet symbiosis, Ben dipping nimble fingers into this stew, or that porridge, and covertly feeding Rey thumbfuls where she gurgles on his chest. He seems to tacitly know exactly what she likes, and so far Luke has gleaned this: Rey loves spicy things. Ben dutifully indulges this as often as he can, giving her licks of tangy sauces and chutneys just to hear the lovely sound of her giggles, which delight everyone present. He’s learned to crook a finger in her mouth to help her take formula, too, and the weeks quickly turn these gestures into an oral fixation; It’s a little odd, but Rey seems happiest when she’s teething and sucking on Ben’s thumb, rather than her own. It’s a greedy little comfort, possessive almost. But it’s one that Ben gives willingly, of course, as he does all else, though does it makes him a little less dexterous to go about his daily duties with only one free hand. He doesn’t mind. Day after day, Luke watches Ben ignite his saber with a flick of a thumb that’s wet, pale-wrinkled, and the two make for a strange juxtaposition, cold chrome and childish tenderness, saturated spit. But Luke yields; as his nephew raises his blade, he can see nothing but the conviction in Ben’s eyes. A peace, a sense of being tethered where there once was boundless wandering.

 

Time passes. The sun rises, and Luke rises in turn to greet it, day in and day out, that thin orange line making the one steadiness in a whirlwind of tiny, crucial dramas that come to pass on their island: teeth lost, species discovered, friendships made, then broken, then mended again. The oldest padawans are finally coming of age, getting old enough and skilled enough to help teach the younglings themselves, and Luke begins to feel like an old and stagnant rock, that fixed point around which beats an effervescent ocean of ever-changing youth. W _as he ever this wild?_ He thinks, watching a pair of eleven-year-olds climb a gnarled tree ten times their age in search of fruit, or an older padawan in the lagoon catch a fish with nothing but the Force and her bare hands. He’s not sure, but still finds himself meditating more often. Even though he’s frequently interrupted—there are scraped knees to mend, lest he forget. The days wear on.

 

She’s one and a half, and her first word is “Ben,” as it must be. The event is reported to Luke by the boy himself. He’s wide eyed, breathless from running, and Luke has to slow the roil of him to a simmer before he can even make out what he’s raving about—“Her first word, Uncle! Her first word, and it was my name!” he cries, bouncing on the balls of his feet, as if ready to take flight at any moment.

Luke laughs. “Could it have been any different?” he asks, placing a hand on Ben’s shoulder, keeping him grounded.

He appears to settle at the touch, then contemplate this, before shrugging. “Probably not.”

Luke’s hand squeezes in gentle affirmation. Ben nods, mouth contorting into strange shapes as he tries _so_ hard to swallow his ecstatic grin; Rey _is_ serious business, after all.

 

Rey’s two, Ben’s twelve, and the sling has shifted long ago to his back, allowing her to paw at the great, green world as she pleases. She’s endlessly curious, constantly grasping at everything within reaching distance, as if she could unravel the intimate meanings of life through tactile strategies alone. Her perch on Ben’s back gives her access to flowers, foliage, berries (benign, and not quite so much—this is a problem), and a fecundity of scents and tastes native to their home. Her favorite part of being on Ben’s back, though, appears to be how easily she can access his ears; she loves to gently tug on them, kiss them, shower them with affection as Ben hikes with her around the compound and surrounding forest after training, her tiny arms around his neck. They’re the vessel into which she whispers the inner workings of the universe, her child thoughts and child wants, and she cherishes their oversized pinkness. Luke soon realizes that this is a quiet year for Rey; though the compound has just gotten used to the wobbling vowels and softened consonants of her new speech, Ben has now become the conduit through which she addresses the world.

One night, out of curiosity, Luke asks Ben what Rey’s saying.

“Well, she says that she likes you, very much,” Ben says, not looking up from his project: darning a saber-singed tabard. He’s on sewing chores tonight, and Rey has been put to bed. He seems to have found respite from the chaos of compound on the patio outside, basking in blue-dark, the coolness of the air insinuating the beginning of the rainy season.

“Really?” Luke says, moving to sit beside him on a rough-hewn bench.

“Yes. She says that you remind her of an old… jackrabbit, is that the word?”

Luke laughs; he’d never considered himself as such a rare creature, but can’t deny that maybe there’s some truth to it.

Ben suddenly looks up, mortified. “Oh uncle—I didn’t mean it in that way! Rey, sometimes she says things just to make me laugh—“

“Ben. Don’t worry, I’m not offended,” Luke says, eyes kind. “So, tell me more—what else does she talk to you about? She spends an awful lot of time whispering into those ears.”

Ben regards him for a second, before returning to his sewing. “Sometimes she tells me stories,” he says, needle flashing in the thick, beige cotton.

“What sorts of stories.”

“They’re stories about us, and not about us, I guess-- they’re silly. Sometimes, she tells me about when I was the sea, and she was a golden island. Kind of like our island, I think, but only—it’s her. Anyways, I’m a good ocean, she says, and my tides wash over her every day. We’re very happy about it,” he says. Then he pauses again. “And some stories where we’re just stalks of grass next to each other, like the dune grass. We’re blown around by the same wind, and we see each other all the time, but we never talk. We’re just…. Near each other, I guess.”

Luke nods, brow furrowed.

“But sometimes, I’m the moon and she’s the sun, and we never, ever meet, because we can’t be in the sky at the same time, no matter how much we want to be.” He shakes his head ever so slightly. “Those ones are the worst. ”

“I see,” Luke says, and his eyes off to some distant horizon as he leans back against the terra-cotta wall. His hand moves to stroke his beard, though he distantly remembers having shaved his face clean this morning when his fingers comb through nothing. Doesn’t matter. _These dreams, they’re_ —

“Uncle? Are you alright?” Ben asks, looking up at him.

“Oh—yes, of course. Just a little tired.” He rises to his feet, resolutely _not_ feeling the creak of his knees. “I’m off to meditate, care to join me?”

Ben shakes his head, gesturing to the tabard in his lap. “I should finish.”

“Alright,” Luke says, heading inside. He stops at the doorway, turning, his shadow casting Ben in blue against the orange of the lamps inside. “Goodnight, Ben.”

Ben looks up. “Goodnight, Uncle,” he says with a nod. Then he returns to his work, the rasp of thread through fabric loud in the night.

Luke’s fist clench in the sleeves of his robe as he walks back to his quarters. _Those eyes!_ Luke contemplates them, that darkness that has seen a thousand lifetimes, as he meditates, humming in the solace of his chambers.

When he surfaces again, it’s dawn.

 

Rey’s three when she comes down with the Dantari flu, and Ben knows she’s sick before she does herself.

Luke is training the younglings in Force-reading when his nephew sneaks into the room, presence barely detectable amongst a dozen of unformed, unruly signatures. At thirteen, his relationship with the Force is maturing, though in Luke’s eyes, it was so recently that Ben was just as raw and young. Being thirteen also translates into an awkward beginning: cracks in his deepening voice, slender limbs that are growing with painful swiftness. Up and up he’s gone, greasy, gangly. But it’s no different than anyone else, and Ben bears it the best that he can.

“Uncle,” he whispers, trying not to disturb the toddlers and their somewhat rumpled concentration. Rey sits among them, wiggling slightly in her lotus pose.

“Ben?” Luke says, cracking an eye open. He can’t deny that he’s not a little irritated.

Luke watches Ben quickly bow his head in penance, before raising it again, and there’s a visible confusion there, a warbling note of worry trembling around him, but there’s no identifiable source. Ben appears to be struggling with this, too; it doesn’t seem like he knows what’s amiss, only that something simply _is_.

“What’s wrong?” Luke asks.

Ben gesticulates jerkily, almost angrily, words tumbling and tangling as he looks from Luke to Rey, then back again. The younglings are rustling around now, tenuous focus cleanly broken by this interruption. Ben balks.

“Rey—she’s—I—“

 

Sure enough, the tiny thing’s sick as a dog. This isn’t the first case they’ve seen; the strain has been cropping up in the compound over the past few weeks, and despite Rey’s seeming disposition towards stubborn sort of healthiness, she’s caught it. Luke finds the two of them in the fresher that night, Ben cradling Rey in front of the toilet as she dozes between bouts of vomiting. _Something’s finally gotten the best of her, then,_ Luke thinks; for the first time in recent memory, she’s not barreling forwards on all cylinders.

Instead, she’s boneless on Ben’s lanky lap, head tipped back against his shoulder in some semblance of fitful sleep. Luke sees the bowl of water and broth at Ben’s side, and suspects he’s been up for hours, and will continue to be for hours more; the sweat on Rey’s brow still speaks of a high fever, though Ben is doing his best to keep it at bay with a damp cloth and little murmurs of affection.

_My poor girl. It’ll pass. You’ll be well soon._

_I need you to drink some water Rey. Would you do it, for me?_

“Do you need anything?” Luke asks, lingering in the doorway.

Ben spares Luke a glance, a quick flash of dark eyes over his shoulder, before returning to the task at hand.

“No, we’re alright.” He says, trying to get the cup to Rey’s lips, though she’s shaking her head. It’s a pitiful motion.

“Please, Rey.” He says, spanning the width of her tiny, burning forehead with one palm, stilling her. Luke can feel him in the Force, trying to coax her from the bottom of her misery, all golden, all nurturing. Finally, she gives.

Rey take a few tiny, trembling sips from the cup in one of Ben’s hands, the other firmly on her little belly to keep her upright.

“ _Good_ , Rey. So strong,” Ben says. Luke steps back; he’s clearly not needed here. In fact, he doubts there’s neither a nursemaid nor medical droid in existence that could provide better care to Rey than Ben Solo.

“I’ll leave you to it,” he says. Ben spares him another glance.

“I’ll let you know if she gets worse,” he offers, taking the cup from her lips.

“Good.”

Luke ducks out of the doorway. He’ll check on them tomorrow; the Dantari flu can be tricky, especially for one so young as her. But for now, he keys the door closed, trying give them some privacy.

“You have a long night ahead of you, but she’ll be alright.” He says quietly. As the door hisses shut, he hears Ben’s answer, slid in through the space between door and jamb:

“I know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Idk pretend jackrabbits exist in this universe?
> 
> Comments very welcome as always! Really appreciate hearing everyone's thoughts.


	3. Chapter 3

The ocean’s tides lap surely against their island’s flanks, the sun makes its away across the sky, and Luke blinks. Two years have passed.

 

 

It’s the middle of the night, and the air is cool, lit by the soft shimmer of distant galaxies, the gentle tumble and turn of the cosmos and all its spindly points of light. In the loamy darkness, someone is knocking on his chamber door.

Though the knocks are timid, the sound of them rings out like a shock in the night, hard against the quiet simmer of the jungle outside. But the visitor is cut short; Luke is already opening the door to his chamber with a wisp of Force suggestion, letting it slide aside with a soft _shush_. In fact, he can already sense the young presence outside, knows precisely who it is and why they’re here.

It’s Yala. The Twi’lek is young, scarcely older than Ben, and his normally robust aura is withdrawing into itself with all the shyness of a saltwater conch. Luke has a decent sense of him; Yala and his nephew like sparring together in their free time. He’s a good kid, quick and strong and highly Force sensitive. Probably, Luke guesses, why he’s here.

“Master Luke, I—“

“I know. Come in,” he says quietly, nodding his head to the boy. Beside Luke, on the ground, sit two others, Kitt and Bren. They’re both equally as young and uncertain, having drifted in only minutes before, first one, and then the other. Both equally as sleep-slow and spooked by a coming in the night. It’s a odd little coven, gathered at a strange and secret hour, but something has drawn them here, inexplicably, and Luke intends to find out exactly what.

 

“So cold. It felt like, I don’t know—“

“Ice.”

“Yeah, just like that. Like Ice.”

The padawans’ voices pile on top of each other, meshing and building as they wake to each other, learn of the weirdness shared between them in their vision.

“I felt like I’d never be warm again, you know?”

“And it was telling me things—“

“There was a voice.”

“Yeah, a creepy sounding voice. Like… an old man’s voice, almost.”

“Real old. But no man I’ve ever heard.”

“But it wasn’t mean, I don’t think?” I didn’t—“

Luke cuts in. “What did it say, exactly?”

They dive back down again, enraptured with each other.

“It wasn’t Basic.”

“Oh, lots of stuff, like—“

“It knew my name. It knew who I was.”

“And it was gentle. And… it felt like a _good_ feeling, kinda.”

“Yeah. It was cold, but only at first. Then—“

“I got used to it. Being cold wasn’t a bad thing anymore.”

“Yeah.”

They quiet, nodding, more to each other than to Luke. Yala’s lekku are twitching, agitated. Bren rolls her shoulders, squinting into the unpleasant, harsh light of Luke’s overhead, and he can tell that their adolescent energy is waning. He contemplates them as they take a collective breath, dizzy with the corroborations of their shared dream. He regards them steadily, but there’s something wrong here, off by the just the barest of degrees, and he can see it, like their skin is just slightly ill fitting around their bones. Like there’s a space inside them, inside their very presence in the Force, that wasn’t there before. An icy hand has hollowed them out-- to be occupied by what, Luke isn’t certain, and can’t know without help. This might be over his head.

He walks them back to their respective chambers, careful to plant a seed of deep sleep inside each mind as he leaves; only a bacta-pad on a more insidious wound, but it’ll have to do until he can contact those in higher places.

Walking back to his chambers, Luke suddenly feels intensely alone. Though he’s out of his depth and knows that he needs guidance, there’s a cold truth: there are few in the galaxy who might be able help him. Here he is, the sole remaining Jedi master, and each movement, each plan, pitches the future of his entire kind onto a different path— yet, he has no map to follow of his own, no heading by which to chart his course.

He looks up. Above the swaying silhouettes of the banya trees, the stars suddenly aren’t quite as kind as they once were, more mocking. Cruel, cold, leaving him lonely. He’s Luke Skywalker, the tiniest, lingering cord at the end of one of the grandest pieces the universe has ever heard, and he feels it in the core of him, that immitigable weight.

For the first time in years, he feels _ancient._

 

He loops around to the other side of the complex, figuring that he has a certain padawan to check on. It would be unlike Ben to miss out on anything that Luke finds strange or terrifying, after all. These things have a way of finding the boy; perhaps his blood is just too tangled up in Skywalker lineage to avoid pulling a few strings of fate on its own. The Force always did love his family just a little too much.

The light is lemon-colored where it slices through the dark, drowsing dormitory, marking a path between the sleep-mussed bunks. He keys the door closed again, just to a bare slit to cast some visibility, but he can already feel it: there, as hot and tiny as a coal, is Rey. She’s here, though she shouldn’t be. Luke’s feet guide him to Ben’s bed (on the left, second from the end), passing through a colorful mix of snores and sighs, drifting up from the room’s various occupants.

Fifteen year old Ben sleeps exactly how Luke would expect him to: facedown on his bunk, sheets and limbs all akimbo, hair an absolute pitch-dark _nest_ on the pale, flimsy cotton. Stark against his sleep clothes, a single suntanned arm is reached across his middle, revealing the figure curled against his far side.

Luke moves with practiced skill accumulated over years of waking before dawn, tread imbued with the same silence of the balmy breeze, the moonlight, that pours from the dorm’s open windows; it’s a mystery, then, how Rey shifts, wakes, as he approaches. But there she is, yawning and blinking up at him, while Ben’s back continues to rise and fall below her, breath still slowed by the heavy spell of sleep.

“Master?” She says, rubbing her eyes. She looks so tiny there, next to the sprawl that is his nephew.

“Rey. You shouldn’t be here, little one.”

“Why?” Petulant, even through her half-asleep haziness.

Luke sighs, breath huffing out through his nose. He knows her, how she gets when she’s like this; there isn’t much point in pushing her any further, especially when she’s around Ben, unless he’s angling for tears.

“You know why, Rey. I’m sorry, you—“

“It was a bad dream,” she says, brow scrunching up. “Ben was having a—a nightmare. I made him feel better.”

_What?_

“Rey—“

“I can do it by myself.” She says, still all stubbornness as she awkwardly runs a hand through Ben’s thick curls, fingers clumsy with sleep. “I can _do_ it.”

“Do what?”

“Make Ben feel better. He was really, really cold. Like…”

Luke already knows the word she’s searching for, but doesn’t have the means to describe; living on the island, she’s never felt anything chillier than seawater on a brisk day, not in her entire life. Her vocabulary has no term to describe something so cold as _ice_ , as the threatening presence of this shadow. He feels it, clouded around the base of his scull, drawn up and condensed by frosty, black particulates of his padawan’s fear.

A fear that, somehow, he can’t sense on Ben— standing so close to the two of them, Luke realizes Rey’s presence has cast itself around his nephew like the gravity well of a star, hot, all-encompassing. Luke brushes against it, and feels none of the cold and ill-fitting darkness that has so stealthily infected the others. The boy is warm, and, more importantly, he is _saved_ , so thoroughly strengthened by the hundreds of gold-gauzy filaments that bind him to Rey, that strange ability to wield the very power of the Force through the abiding bond they share between them. Ben’s resistance towards the visitor is no fluke, Luke knows, remembering a time that feels eons past: the little boy and the baby, inhumanly glowing, locked in the endless eddy and whirl of a trillion medichlorians, for better or for worse. Together.

Rey has apparently given up on grasping at words beyond her five-year-old language, and has settled for giving Ben’s hair a smattering of silent kisses. Luke appears to be gone, for all she cares; she murmurs Ben’s name a few times, and something that sounds suspiciously like the word _mine_ , before slowly succumbing to unconsciousness once more, settling away behind the plane of Ben’s shoulder blade. Luke watches as Ben smacks his lips with a disturbed sleepiness, shifting to his side with a groan, then turning onto his back, automatically taking Rey’s tiny form up with him. She buries her face into his neck with a sigh, clinging to his chest. Ben’s face is pink with pillowmarks, and Rey’s weight just enough to make his breathing wheezy with difficulty, but just the simple love and _rightness_ of it causes a little fraction of his enormous, star-heckled loneliness to dissipate; nothing, he thinks, might look as perfectly content as the two of them do right now.

It’s at that precise moment, standing beside those sleeping heavenly bodies, temples throbbing with lack of sleep and worry, that Luke Skywalker decides that he’s going to call his sister.

 

General Leia Organa looks like she doesn't know how to hold her son. Her arms, though eager and warm, are uncertain against Ben’s back, like she’s not sure exactly when she stopped being able to cocoon herself over his shoulders, and has to go _under_ instead; his chin rests on her shoulder now, his body all curved, willowy limbs and wiry strength. Luke watches Leia’s eyes crest over Ben’s broadening planes, chestnut and wet and crinkled by hard-lived years, to meet his own. _Thank you,_ thank _you,_ they say, _for this joy, for this wonderful and exciting confusion._ For that’s exactly what it is: for the first time in five years, Leia gets to hold her son, and it’s a remapping of sorts, a recalibration of a physical kind, that lets her measure how Ben has changed. How his body is less of that of a boy and more of a _man_ , the way his features are becoming more defined, his face growing into his nose (his father’s nose), those ears she’s always loved so much. How _tall_ he’s become, taller than her and, maybe, even, than—

“Hey, kid.”

It’s the phrase Luke’s heard a thousand times, spoken by a voice that’s a little bit grittier, more roughened around the edges by a few more close calls, but the same one he remembers nonetheless. He looks up so fast that his jaw snaps shut, and there he is: _Han,_ standing at the top of the gangplank, arms tensed from his sides like he’s not sure whether to pick a fight, or to run. _Typical,_ Luke thinks beneath his buried smile. There’re folds in that face, gray in that hair, but his chest is aching with a pleasant fullness because, there in the belly of the Falcon, is the very same man that he left behind twelve years prior. Luke had known that Han was coming, had felt his familiar presence aboard the ship, but _oh_ , it is nothing compared to actually seeing him again, of hearing that familiar cockiness. _Watch it, kid._

Then he sees Ben tense in his mother’s arms. Instantly, the buoyancy in Luke hunkers down like a spooked animal, for the truth remains: he is far, far too old to for these fantasies, bright with a grand new freedom, with camaraderie, forged from memories of taking down the Empire with nothing but their wits and a few rounds of blaster fire. Han is the Force when it was new to Luke, exciting and magnetic, and he’s grown old enough to see the folly of it. He watches Ben raise his head to see his father, and Luke remembers, as he always, always must:

There is another in his place.

“Hey, Dad.” Ben says, slowly stepping away from Leia. He sounds like he’s trying out how the words feel in his mouth, and isn’t sure of the taste. Han walks down the gangplank of the Falcon, slow, bowlegged steps echoing on durasteel. He pauses at the bottom, fists clenching, unclenching, still looking like he might hop back in the cockpit and hightail it out of there. Then, all of a sudden, his arms are full of Ben, and the chances of Han’s escape are reduced from slim to none.

“ _Hey_ , Dad.” Ben’s voice is thick, muffled in the neck of his father’s flight jacket, and Han Solo looks like he might actually melt.

“Ben.” His laugh soft, a huffed out sound, almost a sob, squeezed from him by a pair of young arms whose strength he has yet to fully know. “So, “ Han says, voice in danger of cracking, “Have they taught you any wizard mind tricks yet?”

 

Luke watches their embrace, and then he remembers: there’s someone by his side. A very specific, impetuous someone. Rey’s hand is squeezing down where it’s wrapped around his own; she senses Ben’s turbulent emotions, too. She’s been surprisingly quiet, a little shadow at his side, waiting for Ben to greet his parents. She only has a dim understanding of the concepts of _mother_ and _father_ , both of which apply to Ben in any case. It must be a little bewildering to watch as he receives that kind of attention from someone else, a bit like a hummingbird promiscuously taking nectar from one flower, then the next. Rey’s only five, and her presence feels stung with a hint of childish betrayal that Luke can’t help but smile at; Ben would have to have an awfully poor heart not to have room for all three of them in it, _just as you have learned, Skywalker_. Not to mention that there’s not a being on the island that doesn’t know that Rey is Ben’s favorite person in the entire universe—except her, apparently. He squeezes her hand back as they watch the little family reunite, sending messages reassurance. She’ll figure it out eventually.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well. there's some angst and a pairing you never asked for... oops
> 
> also, underage sex will be /discussed/ in the next chapter, because teenage girls are just as horny as teenage boys, but it won't actually happen. just thought i'd give a heads up. 
> 
> really love your comments, y'all are angels/keep em comin! especially loved the theories as to what'll happen next etc


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Today's my birthday, so I thought I'd post a little vignette from Ben's POV just for fun!! Doesn't have a ton to do with the plot/not really edited haha whoops

One night, in wee hours of the morning, Ben sits up stock-straight in his bunk. Something’s wrong. He’s barely cresting on sixteen, and his heart is pounding, palms and underarms and brow soaked with clammy sweat. In his heart beats nothing but the sickly adrenaline of _fearfearfearfear_ , and it takes him a second to realize that it’s not his own. It has Rey’s distinctive tint, which he recognizes instinctively. She’s hurt, or sick, or worse—in danger, and he’s not quite sure what’s going on, but his feet are stuffed into his boots before he knows what he’s doing, and he’s running to her.

Hot rain stings his face with fat, heavy drops as he runs across the muddy quad to her dorm, lamplight running before his squinted eyes. For a second, he remembers the day when he first met Rey in all her newness, that frigid, biting downpour. Truly, he hadn’t known what it had meant to be warm until he held her. Now the rain is suffocating, and he’s not sure what it means, only that he has to get to her--

 

As it turns out, Rey is _terrified_ of thunderstorms.

She’s already reaching to him with trembling arms when Ben finally finds her, huddled in a pool of tear-tacky sheets in a shadowed corner. Oh, his poor girl. She’s a mess of confusion, shimmering terror, and it buffets his groggy consciousness. He knows precisely what she needs: to be told, body and mind, that he’s here.

_Shh, Rey._

Her sobs gentle as he scoops her up, still just small enough to be easily carried.

 _I’ve got you._ She curls to him with a hiccup, automatically, and it feels like breathing; and this is the echo of a thousand scraped knees, of nightmares, disappointments. He might not be a Jedi quite yet, but Ben knows this: he has utterly mastered the art of Rey in its entirety. He leans against the wall, then slides down it on his back, ending with him sitting on the ground with a lap full of his tiny, terrified heart.

He takes one slender wrist (the one with a scar like a fishhook curved over the brachial, one of her many trophies), and places her hand on his chest. Showing her the pace of his heart is the best way to calm her breathing, he’s learned. Rey’s an excitable child, and the light of her is so intense that sometimes it dizzies Ben himself, bleeds into him and makes his lungs frantic with it. Through a little trial and error, they’ve found this to be best; a shared mediation of sorts-- The first time meditation has been good for _something_ , in his opinion.

He runs a hand distractedly through the puff that is her hair in this humidity, and as her heartbeat slows to match his, he realizes that they can’t stay here. Simply too many people, the risk of waking someone else up, of having to explain what was going on, much too great to wait out the storm here on the floor.

So they don’t.

He takes her to the only place he can think of, as wet and tired as he is: the place Rey calls Their Spot. It’s an old piece of driftwood, a hulking piece of bone-white, decade-dried nobility, tucked against the bluffs on the beach near the compound. It’s been there since Ben can remember, but it was never particularly interesting—until Rey fell in love with it, of course. She’d discovered it on one of their hikes when Ben had let her crawl around in its beetle-y catacombs, run her hand across its ridged, ancient silverness.

 

_Be strong for me, Rey. I know you can._

It’s a place of refuge, of discovery, and once Rey figures out where they’re going, she steels her face against the terror and the driving rain as best she can. They make their way through the jungle, hand in hand, the wide, dark leaves of the deku plants bowing and shivering with the weight of the downpour. Rey is pressed to his side as closely as his soaking leggings, glued to him more tightly with each growl of thunder that echoes in the darkness.

When they reach the beach, her detritus castle is there, as it always is, and Ben crawls inside among its wiry shock of roots, into the hollow of its stump, then hoists Rey up by her armpits. They’re close enough to the treeline that he’s not afraid of a lightning, he decides, though he’s careful not to dwell on it. He doesn’t want Rey to read it on him, the fear. Tonight, he must be her strength.

Sometimes, though, he knows, it’s the other way around.

It’s faintly musty, but it’s dry, and Rey quickly settles herself between his legs, forms his body and his consciousness into layers of protection around herself. Ben goes willingly, of course, wrapping her in slender arms and golden reassurance. His heart sings with it; he loves the way they seem complete together like this, almost as much as he loves her millions of little quirks and complexities that he’s watch develop over the past few years. The garden that is her, that is Rey, which he’s help cultivate from the fallow ground of infancy into a hardy sense of adventure, sharp eyes, a boundless kind of love that burns with all the fierceness of a planet’s fusion. Hot, endothermic, purely from the core of her and nowhere else. She’s stubborn, and sometimes her smart mouth irritates him to _no end_ , but Rey’s the very best of Ben that he could give to the galaxy, and he wouldn’t have her be anything else.

Sometimes it’s a little scary, to be this tied up in this tiny being. He’s sixteen after all, practically a man in his own eyes. He should be finding love in someone else his own age, like all his friends are doing, discovering the pleasures of others and their hot, secret touches. Yet this girl is his ballast—he wants for nothing. He is so perfectly content to live off their simple love. It's been soaked up inside his very bones and it sates him from the inside out, almost to the point of delusion; sometimes, he thinks he might be able to live off her, and only her, no hunger nor thirst nor desire, save for to be nothing but loved by her. It’s intense, overwhelmingly so at times, but this thing between them has winnowed the stuff of them down, filled them out, so that their very beings grow more compatible by each passing year. Habits known and compensated for, fears (thunder, the dark visitor) recognized and protected against. He can read her better than any of his uncle’s old tomes in nothing but a glance, a scant brush against her psyche; he truly is fluent Rey.

So he knows that her fear hasn’t quite abided yet, there in his lap, surrounded by him as they watch the lightning strike the sea outside. Each flash is like a momentary mapping against the dense, dark clouds, a course drawn on a chart across the galaxy that’s only illuminated for the barest second, stays like a glowing wire where it’s burned against his eyelids. A pause, and then another, deeper roll of thunder vibrates them. Rey whimpers.

Suddenly, for the first time in years, the gentle insinuation of an old routine breezes across his mind: Rey wants to suck his thumb. It’s—surprising, he guesses, considering that she hasn’t wanted this in years, but it’s not particularly worrying. Rey is scared, and this is one of the best, oldest comforts she knows. So he lets her, resettles them to accommodate this; right thumb, crooked up into her soft palette, as is her preference. In this way, finally, Rey begins to find some kind of calm, there against the whorls of his thumbprint, in the darkness of the driftwood citadel. The staging of their refuge harkens back to a younger time, back when Ben’s life was full to bursting with Rey’s whispered stories in his ears.

Ben has some stories of his own, though they haven’t been told for a long, long while, he thinks. Knowing Rey, they’re probably forgotten. So there, in the humid and storm-split night, Ben decides to spin Rey the only tale that he knows: that of a man, and his boy, and the vast, wonderful blackness of space.

Stroking his hand in circles across her stomach, he pauses only for claps of thunder, telling Rey of their adventures, whispering in her own tiny ears about their grand escapes and discoveries among the stars. The scream of booster engines, the ozone-smell of hyperspace, the exultant feeling of his father’s pride shining brighter than the most intricate of nebulas.

Ben tells her his stories, until the horizon is blushing with the hope of dawn and Rey’s eyelids are fluttering with the weight of exhaustion. Ben tells her of his time before her birth, of that fertile, velvety darkness he so loved, until she falls asleep in his arms, no longer afraid.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warnings discussed in chap 3 have actually been pushed back!

Han and Leia don’t know exactly what to make of this creature who orbits their son, at first. A little moon with sparrow bones, hovering around a planet made molten by hormones and its own constant reformation. A strange spectacle, tidally locked.

 

“This is Rey,” Ben says, wiping away his tears with the back of his hand, even as he’s pretending not to. “She’s… a friend.”

Luke loosens his grip on her hand, lets her step forwards and into the scrutiny of these two unknowns. She lingers by his side at first, before quickly running to Ben, burying herself in the fold of his robes, like a pendulum swung from one safe place to another. Ben laughs, a bit phlegmy, but real, raising one arm to bring his robe aside to reveal her hiding spot.

Exposed, she grips the coarse, cream-colored fabric of Ben’s trousers with one hand, peering up and around his flank at the two of them.

“Hi, Rey.” Leia says, breaking into a smile. Her eyes fold at the edges in a way that belies her commanding presence; Luke knows that now she _gets_ it. This was the missing piece, the key to the warmth and steadiness that Ben now holds in his heart. She’s sensitive to the intimate workings of their bond, and Luke feels her pluck gently at the fine goldenness that ties her son to this girl, testing it curiously.

Rey shivers with the feeling, but holds fast.

“Hey, kiddo.” Han’s crouching down a bit, getting on her level. “I’m Han. Ben’s dad.”

He sticks out a hand in greeting (Luke smiles at the sight). There’s a pause, then, tentatively, Rey reaches out and touches his index finger; she clearly doesn’t know what to do with this business of hand shaking. Han’s puzzled by this, but, before he can think, Rey’s fingers are reaching up, brushing his nose instead, gaze locked on his face. She’s utterly enraptured.

“This—this is Bens.” she says, as if it were the most simple truth in the world.

Luke chalks up the fact that Han doesn’t fall on his ass purely to the reflexes he’s honed over a lifetime of dishonest living; he’s totally thrown, ungracefully trying to catch his balance against the dusty earth.

Rey’s brow furrows. She’s never seen anything as strange as familial resemblance before in her life, has no tools to make sense of the way Ben is cobbled together from these two people who came from space, delivered to her on the clunk and whine of a crummy old freighter. Her hand clamps down on Han’s nose outright. Family is not blood, family is Ben. Family is Luke.

“You _stole_ it from him!”

There’s an awkwardly still pause from all parties. Nobody speaks. Finally, Han:

“Well, kiddo,” he says, unfurling to his full height, “I’m sorry to say it, but you’re dead wrong.” His eyes flick to Bens for second, as if asking permission, before returning to Rey. “Ya see, that little bastard—“ a head nod to Ben, “—well, he stole it from _me!_ ”

And with that, he’s caught Rey up in his arms, and she’s shrieking with joyful surprise, giggling as he tickles her under the chin.

“ _Han_.” Leia voice is sharp; she doesn't exactly abide by the swearing, but even her best, most diplomatic poker face isn’t able to cover the warmth in her eyes. Though he’d only admit it himself under duress, Han Solo was made to be a father. Luke took years to come to terms with it, but it’s true; it’s glorious, watching how quickly he understands Rey, her ease with him in return, teasing and playing and kicking up dust.

Luke wonders if Ben’s childhood had been like this, too. He looks aside to Ben, who’s some strange mixture of awestruck and jealous, and remembers that dark little thing, so aged under the weight of his worry.

Somehow, Luke doubts that felt that love.

 

He has forgotten her. No, not truly forgotten, in a literal sense—her presence is always there, tucked away somewhere in the corner of his mind, for always. A beacon, dim in the fog, lit from that strange, blue hologram flickering in his terra-cotta hovel eons in the past. But Luke, until this moment, has forgotten how important his sister really is. It’s like he’s been thrashing in the open sea, gulping at air, legs treading desperately, and all at once she’s the sandy bottom, risen to meet his feet. To catch, to bear the weight of him. To say: _there is another._

They’re eating lunch in the shade. The red clay of the quad is blazing with the heat of high noon, and all the padawans have retreated to the relative cool of the compound to take their break. Han and Ben have gone to the beach, Rey in tow. They seem to like spending time there over the past few days, just the three of them, and Luke is perfectly content to let them do as they please.

“He seems so happy.” She says, sitting up a little straighter. Luke has noticed her unfamiliarity with her plainclothes; she keeps reaching to adjust lapels that aren’t there, straighten an invisible insignia on her breast.

Luke smiles. “Yeah.” _And you know why._

Insects scream from the jungle.

“Where did she come from, exactly?”

“I—honestly, I couldn’t tell you. Someplace in the Outer Rim, I think, my neck of the woods. But Ben, he knew. When she was born, I mean. It was right out here,” he says, gesturing to the quad. “It was like… he turned around one day, and suddenly he was just twenty years younger!”

Leia laughs. “Sometimes I really thought that he was the oldest kid I ever knew. He was always like that.” She pauses. “When he started getting quiet, I was honestly worried. Sometimes, I swear to god, I thought to myself— _is he really Han’s_?” She glares at Luke, but he doesn’t stop laughing. “I’m not joking!”

She looks down at her lap. “But now I get it, I guess. Sort of.” Her eyes meet his. “You were always better at this Force stuff than me, Luke.”

_Wrong._

“Why her?”

“Again, don’t know what to tell you. I think this just happens, sometimes.” He waves his hands vaguely. “The Force works in mysterious ways.”

Leia snorts. “Well then, I take it back. You have no fucking clue, either.”

“True.”

They banter easily as they finish the rest of their meal, a simple salad of roots and greens, before Luke finally asks her the question he brought her across the galaxy to answer:

“Do you feel it, too?”

“What?” She puts down her fork, brow knit in confusion. “Don’t Jedi-riddle me, _brother_ —I know you speak Basic perfectly well, thank you.” Ever the politician.

Luke keeps his tone as level, maintaining eye contact as best he can. “There’s an imbalance in Force. A new Darkness. I—I don’t know what it is.”

He tells her about the strange midnight coming from a few weeks before, the clutch of troubled padawans that were violated by this presence. He tells her about Ben and Rey and the way she delivered him from evil, barely.

Her shoulders sag and her eyes go quiet; this is the old sadness coming out, Luke knows. This is what she keeps buried above all else, the thick scar tissue around her heart that hems and haws with the coming of storms, the uneven pressure fronts of grief:

Alderaan. She’s thinking of Alderaan, and how their work is never, ever done. She’d lost her home, and now she’s almost lost her son. For a moment, Luke is nearly overwhelmed by a sense of secondhand heartache, but he centers himself with a deep, cleansing breath; they’re twin in this, as they are in most things, after all. They can bear it together.

_I’m sorry, sister._

She finally meets his eyes, and gives him the softest, most melancholy smile he’s seen in decades.

_I know._

For a moment, she might be as ancient as him. Two hearts, beating with more longevity than they have any right to possess, through pain and loss and the realignment of the galaxy. In spite of themselves. She shakes her head slightly, and, just like that, the feeling has dissipated; the universe moves on, as it must, with or without them.

 

“Well, we’ve been hearing a lot about this one group, recently. They despise the Resistance,” she grins ruefully,” And have strong Empire sympathies. Very right leaning. They call themselves the First Order—maybe this has something to do with them? I can’t imagine that they’d really align themselves with the old Jedi values.”

Luke pauses. “Hm. It’s a possibility.”

“We’ve been trying to keep them down, but they’re awfully stubborn. I’ll keep my eye on them, let you know if I hear anything. Or _feel_ anything, I suppose.”

“Thank you, Leia.”

He places wide, calloused hand on hers where it rests on the table between them. He feels the presence of her, scarred, but warm and steady, brush against his own. It’s reassuring. A gentle smile passes between them. No longer are the stars as cold, as harsh; maybe they don’t have to navigate them alone, anymore.

 

Rey cries when they leave. It takes Ben, who’s a master at these sorts of things, the rest of the morning and afternoon to soothe her. Luke half expects her to be most upset about the fact that she doesn’t have parents of her own, but he sees the way that Ben dries her tears with kisses, brushes her hair into the three buns she so loves, and decides that she needs for no mother nor father; Ben is both, perfectly.

 

And so the years pass. The rumor of the darkness lingers at the edge of Luke’s consciousness, but it drifts to the wayside with the coming and going of months. Leia and Han call more frequently now, checking up on Ben and Rey, filling in Luke with a name or two, occasionally, solidifying the vague opposition into something more tangible: The First Order, enemy to all who might call themselves a Jedi.

But that drama is only budding, and taking place on a stage light-years and light-years away. Mostly, Ben’s parents are concerned with softer things, like watching as Rey keeps shooting up and up; it’s the wonderful growth of childhood that they never truly saw Ben through, so they dote on her during it, checking in on teeth lost, inches gained, scars acquired, somewhere in between their lives of tactical planning and cargo routes.

Ben has grown too, if not in a less literal sense—his height seems to have finally plateaued at a full half head taller than Luke, as if the boy had to prove a point, couldn’t have settled for just a few inches to lord over him (Luke has come to terms with this, but only grudgingly). Ben’s baby fat has finally melted into hard angles, and, with no more upward momentum, he’s starting to fill out, long days of brutal training finally forming into toned musculature. He’s still willowy, but he is stronger, in every sense, and Luke takes pride in the man he’s becoming. Han and Leia do too, he knows it, sees it in their smiles as Ben slowly unfolds himself to them.

When he’s eighteen, he passes the rudimentary trials Luke has put in place, a rough version of the nine-fold path of the old Order—Luke had only been able to find a few crumbling tomes outlining the nuances of padawan training; for the most part, he’s had to create the program from the ground up. Once again, thrust naked and unprepared into the brunt of this responsibility, forced to simply trust in the Force and some half-hope that he’s doing the right thing.

 

Teamwork. Isolation. Fear. Anger. Betrayal. Focus. Instinct. Forgiveness.

Protection.

 

Honestly, Luke can’t imagine being so young and traversing something so broad, so deep reaching as these trials. When he was Ben’s age, he was given little; a handful of words, a few days, a saber, going in blind on the echo of Kenobi’s learnings, wither-worn over years of desert hermitage. He hopes he’s given these young ones something more than that, but he’s not sure.

His pupils prove themselves beyond all expectation, naturally. Over the course of three months, Ben, along with the rest of his peers, navigate these ancient, heavy values. Three months of sweat, of sparring, saber wielding, Force-sense, meditation. After a little delegation with Rey, they decide that he’s cleared to do the jungle trial, too, spending a week alone in the wildness with nothing but his saber and his wits.

It doesn’t go as well as planned, but then, when has it ever, where his nephew is concerned—it’s the longest he’s been away from Rey, and it shows. Though she’s a nexus of nervous energy and adrenaline when he’s leaving, she goes all sallow and quiet the instant he’s gone, and Luke grows more worried about her as the days pass. He can only wonder at how Ben’s faring at his end, hopes he’s faring well. 

On Rey’s end of things, though, it’s not going great. On the third day, it’s becoming too much, the bond stretched too thin; she’s stopped eating entirely, has gone all glassy-eyed with absence. He can feel the distance like a tangible thing, taut and uncomfortable and terrible, across his own consciousness. On the fourth day, she doesn’t get out of her bunk. When Luke searches through the rumpled sheets, grabs her hand and presses a frantic finger to her tiny wrist, her pulse is sluggish. It’s gone to far; _oh Gods!_ Luke might have made an awful mistake.

 

Ben, of course, has already returned to the edge of their compound when Luke calls out to him in the Force. He also doesn’t appear to be in much better shape than Rey, as if some secret part of his heart has broken down, given in. There are deep circles under his eyes, a dryness to his lips, and a listlessness to his movements that Luke can’t attribute to any malady the jungle might inflict. _No_ , Luke thinks as he looks upon this specter, _this is purely Rey_. As he hoists the girl into the waiting arms of this derelict version of his nephew, some small part of him finds this intensely interesting—if it wasn’t life threatening, of course. Oh, how much it must have cost him to be caught between a rock and a hard place like this, pining for Rey, but dreading certain failure if he returned. Luke feels a pang of guilt. He should never have spread them so thin; It might complicate things a bit, this unusual weakness, but they can work around it.

Ben curls against her immediately, nuzzling his forehead to hers, indicating no inkling of desire to move from this spot until he’s re-learned Rey in her entirety, compensated for the four days of his absence. She stirs, only to lean closer to his touches. Already, color is returning to their ashen cheeks, a warming in their combined aura and in their tactile presence.

Once again, Luke finds himself dumbstruck at the sight of them, the wholeness they emit as naturally as a star might emit radiation. _No—not weakness. A strength of the purest, most powerful kind._

It’s then that Luke decides, finally, that it’s time.

Ben’s still so young, coming up hard on nineteen, but his nephew and the other padawans-verging-on-knights are ready for it: it’s time to leave their island. He’s seen how restless they’re becoming, their honed Force sense and amassed strength on the incisive edge of growing too big for the bounds of their jungle, their cradle, and now it’s time to leave.

It’s just for a few weeks, Luke decides, on a mission to find kyber crystals on a planet in a nearby system, but chance to leave their island all the same. He’ll go with them, of course, leave his oldest and most trusted pupils to watch after the young ones. After today, Rey will come, too. He’s not sure that Ben could make it if she didn’t—if either of them could—and Ben has earned his spot on the shuttle, proved it in the concrete solidness of sweat and skill and knowledge.

This is their first true step to becoming full-fledged Jedi; it’s Luke’s first step in shifting the course of the universe, as well, perhaps, borne on the backs of the new generation. It sounds a little like hope.

 

Until, of course, everything goes to absolute _shit_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Long A/N ahead:  
> Ahh i have kind of a love/hate relationship with this chapter, but now it's finally published. This story as a whole has gotten way longer/plottier/more in depth in general as it goes on, thanks in part to the great suggestions of you guys!! someone said that they wanted more soulbond h/c, so who am I to refuse (more to come, btw). Han and Leia weren't really going to be mentioned in my original plot either, but now I'm glad that somebody suggested it!!  
> What I'm saying, pretty much, is that the feedback that I've been getting for this story has been so amazing, and thank you guys so much-- you've formed it into something much bigger than I initially imagined.  
> Also, some amazing fanart has been made for this story! I'm seriously blown away by this. Nobody has ever drawn anything for something I've written, and I can't say how happy this makes me :) Check it out here:  
> http://iconosquare.com/p/1178323130114253117_185771415  
> and here:  
> https://www.instagram.com/p/BBdFx-MliGa/


	6. Chapter 6

Maybe it’s the moisture farmer in his blood, Luke thinks, that spurs the jump in his heartbeat.

They’re accelerating, pushing up and away from their home, piercing their planet’s atmosphere in a gut-wrenching arc of booster-fuel and g-force.

The shuttle is old, but trustworthy. He’d been a little skeptical, honestly, after a decade and a half under little more than a tarp, but everything miraculously seems to be humming in a kind of synergistic order. The accelerator is comfortable in his grip as he guides them through the thinning air, and for the first time in years, there’s something in him that feels _fresh_. He rides the adrenaline edge, vibrating through him in time with the hull, and is reminded of a small, but important, detail: no matter how much Skywalker he carries in him, he was crafted of a different alloy-- he’s the son of Owen Lars, a child of doubled sunlight and sand, and somewhere inside Luke, perhaps, space is still laced with just a little bit of _magic_.

Rey cries out when they’ve finally cleared the stratosphere. Luke glances behind him, watches her yank her hand from Ben’s grip and press both hands to the viewport beside her, like she’s trying to grasp the very blackness in her sweaty fists. He smiles. The others are in a similar state; like Rey, most of them were much too young to remember being taken to their island, and he can see their sensory overload in the way they’re white-knuckling their armrests.

Just six of them, including Luke. A small group, but Luke thinks this is best—he’s still a little hesitant to leave the island at all, let alone bring all of the older padawans with him. Also, the not-inconsiderable fact that this shuttle is scarcely large enough for all of them _now_ ; it’s an elderly model, even by Luke’s standards, about half the size as the Falcon, with a crammed cockpit, tiny passenger lounge, and modest overnight accommodations. It’s not exactly made for long journeys, nor a large group of rambunctious teenagers.

Rey, of course, more than makes up for this in her own way. As soon as they’ve coasted to a stop, preparing for their hyperspace jump, she’s already out of her seat, running excitedly from window to window, trying vainly to gain some sort of scope of the true emptiness of this new and wonderful place.

Her presence is lighting up the shuttle, vibrating with complete, radiant abandon, but Luke doesn’t quite enjoy the idea of his tiniest padawan getting dashed against the aft wall when they make the jump.

“Ben—could you—“

But his nephew is already gathering her up, strapping her into his lap with two strong arms. She squirms, furious that there’s so much out there outside the ship _and she can’t explore it_ , but he shushes her.

“Ready,” he says simply, voice deep around Rey’s high-pitched, indignant yelps.

And so they are. With the flip of a switch, Luke, along with his tiny crew of the galaxy’s burgeoning hope, are sent catapulting into the blue-blinding current of hyperspace.

 

Something isn’t right. Luke glances over the cockpit’s various readouts once again, triple-checking that everything is running smoothly. No problems there; acceleration compensator, cooling systems, the hyperdrive—they’ve all shuffling stalwartly along, working as well as this ship might be expected to. _No, that’s not it_. Something else is making him nervous. It’s a feeling akin to the terrible, nauseating inevitability of knowing that he’s going to vomit, making his palms slick, flooding his mouth with saliva. He swallows, watching his padawans where they’ve settled down for their day’s journey, tucked into various corners of the ship. Some of them are in the bunks, but Kitt’s asleep, curled up between the storage lockers and the grill of the ventilation system. Ben and Yala bookend Rey at the compact table, reading her something on a data-pad, pushing up against her shoulders from either side. Luke watches as Yala dips down to make a face, bugging out his eyes and tongue, and she giggles at the sight, tugging impishly on one of his lekku. Two brothers with their little sister between them, a tiny family—something in Luke’s chest echoes with the image of him and Leia and Han, in a different time.

All at once, before his eyes, Rey quiets, as if she can intuit Luke’s gaze just by the brush of it against her cheeks. When their eyes meet, Luke remembers: she is so _golden_. He can’t quite hide how much the intensity of her eyes startles him. _When did they become so knowing, so incredibly sensitive to the world around her?_ She smiles, little dark gaps between her teeth where the baby ones have fallen out, and waves to him. Ben and Yala glance up, together, and Luke gives the three of them a smile, though sure looks much more strained than he should really let on, more of a grimace than anything else. Then he turns back to the controls; his guts are roiling against each other, and he hasn’t the foggiest idea why.

He combs a hand through his hair. _Trust your instincts._ One of the oldest pieces of advice Obi-wan Kenobi had ever given him. Or maybe it was the _only_ one, a little hard pit of understand parsed from of those few days of harried saber-swinging, of cryptic Jedi riddles. Luke can’t remember much, save for the importance of that singular, unwavering idea.

It’s entirely possible that Luke Skywalker is the most ill-trained, underprepared Jedi master the universe has ever seen, but he knows this: he trusts in the Force, and he trusts in his gut.

And right now, both are telling him that something is terribly, horribly wrong.

 

The tap water in the fresher does nothing to clear his mind. It runs limply down the folds around his eyes and mouth where he’s splashed it, drips from his hair, tasting recycled and metallic. The cubicle has been afforded a small mirror, and, after some thought ( _why not?),_ he slowly bends a bit to catch his face in frame. He nearly jumps, flinging water droplets everywhere; there’s a reflection he hasn’t seen in over a decade looking back at him, and it’s disturbingly alien. Not the fine wrinkles, nor the greying hair—Luke never cared for his looks much, anyways, though he was assured by many, after the fall of the Empire, that he was good-looking in his youth. No, he knew, in its transient way, that the aging of flesh was the natural course of everything in this existence, a path forged by the Force itself.

In the mirror there’s a different kind of age, something carried in the set of his eyes, that sets him reeling. They’re that same old powder blue, the color of the high noon sky on Tatooine, pale and sand-scrubbed.

That familiarity has changed, somehow.

It’s the same thing that caught him when he found Rey’s eyes, in a sickening reversal-- _when had he become so care-worn, so star-wearied and uncertain_? A droplet rolls down his cheek. In the shuddering glimmer of it, Luke notices, for the first time, that he’s trembling.

 

Luke will remember all of this. The precise arrangement of the quivering beads of dew across his eyelashes, the prickle of wetness in his beard, against his skin. The watery light overhead, deepening the creases in his papery skin to canyons. He’ll remember it for the rest of his life, carrying the face that tiny mirror against his chest until the end of time, burning it on the inside of his ribs, because this is it: the moment of his greatest failure.

 

Everything changes so quickly it’s _sickening_. A snarl across the Force, bright and cold and terrible as Hoth once was, all those years ago. Frostbite-blackened, crackling with a sheen of frozen sweat. The humming thread of tension has snapped, and all he can he can see is slain animals in snow, matted fur and black-blood— _blood, blood._

Yala is dead.

Yala’s light has gone from this place, and Luke has lost a part of himself with it; that’s the simple truth. A life he’d known, nurtured, for nearly twenty years, gone as easily as the light of a distant star, hidden behind a finger raised to the night sky.

Luke blinks and he’s knocked Bren to the ground in the tiny corridor, tearing from the fresher and towards the fore of the ship. His padawan scrambles against the wall, is as fear-tight as a spooked animal, with Drea close behind—he can only catch the whites of their eyes, wide, terrified in the dimness, before he’s turned away.

Luke thinks he tells them to stay there, out of sight, but he’s not sure; he’s already gone, on to face the nightmare ahead. Luke remembers now, knows precisely who and what and why, remembers the texture of that frigid darkness:

Ancient, wretched, and entirely Luke’s own fault.

 

The smell of burning flesh is so strong, so fresh, that Luke’s eyes water with it.

He sees Ben first. His nephew is backed up against the auxiliary controls, arms and legs splayed wide, slick palms leaving smears where they’re planted on the plastisteel behind him. He’s purely terrified, shoulders heaving with huge breaths; he’s got Rey there, though Luke can barely see her, tucked in the tiny pocket of space between is back and the curved wall of the shuttle. She’s making little sobs, breathy half-gasped things that make Luke’s heart hurt with the sound of them. Beneath the ground, mere feet away, lies Yala, and Luke can already see where he’s been neatly cloven in two. Shoulder to hip, pieces disconnected from each other as easily as two pieces of machinery. No blood. Never any blood.

“Skywalker.”

It’s Kitt, the mellow timbre of her voice, and yet entirely _not._. Luke finds her where she’s crouched in the opposite corner, saber cocked over her head in a stance that Luke knows he’s never taught her, the blue of the blade splitting the very air of their cramped space with a warbling whine. She’s watching him like a predator might, shifting her stance, adjusting and readjusting her grip, and there is no reality in which this person resembles the young woman he raised from childhood. _Oh, what a one to be chosen._

Luke has never been colder than this.

Her gaze flicks away, back to Ben, and Luke grasps at her mind immediately, trying to pry Kitt free from this darkness. He’s rejected in a heartbeat, like the repelling pulse of two electromagnets forced against each other.

 _Heel, old man._ The voice cuts directly to the core of him, Luke’s left reeling, vaguely sensing that he’s tipped to one knee, crashed against the lip of the table. He’s paralyzed, held down by the cold presence, and can only watch as not-Kitt advances towards his Ben and Rey, saber high.

Luke shakes, there on the floor, and he can’t even unlock his jaw enough to scream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heyy i'm back i took a crack at writing smut and here i am again
> 
> thank you for being so patient! ! here's some angst you never asked for


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> probably RIFE with mistakes, i'm so sorry

There is no worse sound in the universe, Luke thinks, than the sound that Rey makes when Kitt breaks her arm.

There’s a terrible, burning flash in the Force, and at first, Luke only knows that _something’s_ happened—he tries to decipher what, exactly, around the whirl of Ben’s robes as he clutches and claws at her, but he can’t quite catch it. And then there, in the flurry of activity, he sees: her skin has gone shock-pale, eyes screwed tightly shut with a pain that’s oversized, too enormous for her tiny body. She cradles her arm against her chest like a wounded animal, gasping in tight, hiccuped breaths.

Ben’s speaking to her, way out in the distance, somewhere too far away for anyone in this room to hear. His voice is fast and calm and low, but his words are indistinct, and Luke can catch the edge of his white-hot fear through his presence. Ben gathers her up to his chest, trying vainly to put something between Rey and danger, and he’s so, so _focused_ ; the whole fulcrum of his existence pivots on the little injured bird in his arms. It always has.

Her arm’s been crushed by a terrible being wearing his padawan like skin, and his nephew is becoming positively unhinged at the sight of it.

“Solo.”

Ben’s head whips around, hair in his dark, fear-wild eyes, and Luke cranes his neck awkwardly to look at Kitt, stubble scraping across the durasteel. She’s obscured by the edge of the auxiliary temp unit, but he can still see inky curl of her hair, her deep skin, the blue blaze of her saber. Broken up like this, little snatches of hair and clothing, she might be the girl Luke once knew. The girl he remembers hanging off the crook of his arm, anxious to show him the new technique she’d honed. Dexterous, brilliant.

“Finally, you’re here,” she says, and Luke feel his heart sink at the strange, flat timbre of her voice. He can’t see her face, but just that, the absence of any kind of joy or liveliness, is enough to slide the wrongness of this whole thing right under his ribs and truly fuck with his heart. She’s gone.

“Stars, you don’t know how long I’ve waited,” she says. Her saber is by her side now, Luke can hear the singing hum of it. “A wiley one, you are.”

“The fuck do you _want_?” Ben’s voice is soft from the other side of the room, trembling, heavy with a terror drawn up deep from the well of him. Rey is splayed across his lap, and he holds her like she’s made of glass.

Kitt barks, and it takes Luke a second to realize she’s laughing. “Oh— _surely_ you know. You’re smart, I know you are. That’s why I like you.” She takes a step forwards, saber still complacently lowered. “You’re so incredibly worthy, Ben. Can’t you see it? You’re meant for better things than—“ Luke catches a glimpse of one clawed hand as she waves it around the ship’s interior, “—this sentimental shit.

Last hope of the galaxy, and all that.”

 _Foolish, and you know it_. The voice cuts into Luke like ice.

“I know how much you want for something else, Ben,” she continues on, like she each word doesn’t sizzle with the all the coal-bright burning of a brand. “Your master doesn’t see it, but I do. Maybe not Dark, but not Light, either. Some terribly lonely in-between.”

Luke thinks of the boy he knew, once, nine years ago, and shivers; there might be more truth to this than he ever expected.

“You think you’re monstrous, Ben. We all know it,” she presses, words flat in that weird, dead voice. Ben visibly flinches. But he doesn’t say no.

Luke didn’t know it was possible for his heart to break any further than it already has, but. Well. He’s still learning, isn’t he.

He watches as his nephew curls further into Rey, trying to draw some sort of strength up from her feeble presence, fortify both of them against the stinging truth. Luke feels at Ben’s mind and nearly gasps; his mind is boggled by the sheer idea of Ben being able to simply _function_ with so much fear and sadness all hidden up inside him. Staggering, exhaustive. Too much for one person to bear alone. He reaches to Rey, tries to calm her pain and coax her fire; Ben needs her now, more than ever.

“Oh, yes. That,” Kitt says. “That’s just it, isn’t it? If it wasn’t for that pitiful girl, you’d already be honing yourself to a much greater goal, know a power so much more than anything you could ever even _conceive_. You’d already be mine.” A pause. “And your friend wouldn’t be dead, I suppose.”

A sound rips from Ben at the mention of Yala, somewhere halfway between a sob and a shout, completely involuntary, completely animal.

“A bond. Troublesome thing, that.” And now, finally, the saber slowly rises, cocked high over her head in a _vapaad_ hold that leaves Luke scrambling against the heavy paralysis in his muscles, _oh fuck, oh_ fuck; this is the end of all things.

She’s coming towards them, hard and fast and terrifyingly real, and Luke can’ t do a thing to stop her

“Ben,” it’s growling, voice an awful falsity of Kitt’s own, something twisted, wrong and sour. “Come, boy, just let me cut the damn thing _off—_ “

 

Later, Luke will think about this moment in the context of motherhood, of all things. It comes up on the back of an old memory, rising, unbidden: a wicked sandstorm from back in ancient times, when the vaporator on the farm had broken down, pinning him by his leg, crushing it instantly. He remembers the pain more than anything, sand in his eyes and ears and mouth. But then, miraculously, freedom; His aunt, her dark silhouette huge against the dim-hazed suns, lifting the metal beast with seemingly inhuman strength, enough let him drag himself free.

He thinks of the lock-jawed adrenaline that had pumped in her muscles, the utterly instinctual compulsion to _save_ , everything be damned, and now understands that need a little more. The part of him that was able to break free, flick his silver saber at his across the room, had something to do with that kind superhuman strength, he thinks. The way it had slipped from his belt, tumbling like an errant ship through the emptiness of space and into the deft grip of his nephew’s hand, born from a pure love, something selfless. He’ll think of that, later, of the only mother he ever knew. Of her strength.

Now, there’s bile rising in his throat, sweat running in his eyes with the effort of resisting the hold. His vision swerves dangerously close to total blackout, but Luke can still hear it:

The sweet sound of ignition.

 

The screeches and sizzles of their fight are decadently loud over the soft hum of the engine, the whir of their craft as it slips through hyperspace. The blows are blindingly fast, blades tucked in tight to their bodies; any errant slice risks renting a vital piece of equipment in two, slitting a whole in the hull, boiling all their brains where they sit in their skulls. The galaxy’s last Jedi master and his very best padawans, cooked in their skins in less time than it takes to draw a breath.

Luke wants to avoid this, if at all possible.

Kitt’s slices and parries are a savage thing to watch; if there was ever any doubt that someone else was holding her reins, that doubt in now gone. Her grip, the way she stabs out from the hip, the brutal weight on her slices, all are things that Luke never taught her how to do. He remembers, once, how he fought his father, and in some sickening way, Kitt reminds Luke of him. The simple ruthlessness of Sith form, embodied by willowy limbs, delicate wrists, making the hold of Kitt’s kind shoulders go all skewed and snarled.

 

Each blow digs deeper, harder. Ben fights like he’s dying and Luke thinks that what he’s feeling might be a sick and twisted kind of pride; this is what he’s been training him for, years and years of muscle-memory. Clean, savage, _first form, third form, fifth form_ , red clay dust of the quad staining his boots so deeply and thoroughly that he can no longer scrub it out. Weight and counterweight, the swirl of robes as, slowly but surely, Ben starts to _advance_. He’s finally building off of Rey, Luke realizes, drinking deeply from their bond and drawing strength from her body, doubling and strengthening himself with her medichlorian count.

Here they are, those golden children from so long ago, sitting on Luke’s bunk and splitting open the very workings of the Force, their feast, their fruit. Stupid, ancient Luke. He only has a dim understanding of the inner workings of this thing, but knows: Ben and Rey have been fucked up, divided and re-bound again, but not without reward. Cursed, kissed by the very fiber of the Force that’s knit right into their bones.

The sting-bright dawn of understanding crests over him as he lays squirming on the floor, watching Ben fight for his life. For Rey.

Here is the truth: not this day, but someday, Ben and Rey might be more powerful than him. Than Anakin was, than anyone.

That’s an awfully terrifying thought.

But there are sabers singing and for now, Ben is good and Not-Kitt is _better;_ his nephew might never live long enough to wield that power at all, and that’s much more frightening, much more real. They clash again, once more, and then Ben cries out: Kitt’s saber has glanced his arm, slipping through his sleeve, and the smell of burnt flesh grows impossibly thicker. All at once, she has the upper hand, skirting around his weakened form towards his vulnerable side: the little body curled up on the floor, pale and stiff with the magnitude of her pain. Luke watches, transfixed, as Ben tries vainly to lunge before her, distract, do something to keep Kitt at bay because she’s advancing on Rey _and he will not allow it_ , but it’s heartbreaking—a swift, vicious left hook to the temple, snuck in between flashing blades, a boot heel to the stomach, and _fzzzt._

Clean-cut.

His nephew’s head clips the edge of the table as he falls, saber skittering across the room, and for some fucked-up reason, all Luke can manage to think is _not a hand not a hand not a hand_ ; somehow, the poetry of that would break him. He’s sure of it. He imagines Ben with cruelly mismatched hands, like him, like his father before him, spindly bio-tech, the black leather glove. So thoroughly yoked to the Skywalker bloodline that it’s written clearly in his wounds.

But no, just fingers, and Luke could laugh with relief--- three, strange, pale things, scattered on the ground like some grotesque dice. Ben’s saved. From a terrifying symmetry, at least; Luke can’t even breathe because he’s never felt more powerless than this. Ben’s grounded, Rey’s shivering beneath the shadow of this monster as it moves to kill her, and he no longer has a weapon to provide. No wise words to give. No slip-thin opportunity, even, to sacrifice his own body as a target or a shield or as a weapon.

 _You’ve failed, old man,_ says the cold, dark thing.

 _Yes_ , he trembles. _Yes._

Kitt bears down on Rey, and Luke remembers those bitter-cruel stars.

 

It wasn’t Ben, he’ll tell himself, later. Ben could not be capable of something like this.

 

Luke knows Sith. Knows them much more fully and intimately than he’d ever hope to, how they fight, how they _feel_ , the red-raw weight of the Force at its very darkest. Beast, wet-muzzled, jowls dripping with viscera.

So Luke knows instantly that Ben, his boy, the one he’s raised since he was old enough for it to matter—he feels like a _Sith_.

Luke feels the breath flee from him, pressed out by the force of this anger that’s not just hot, but cruel, deep and Dark, one thousand degrees removed from any mood he’s ever felt flicker across Ben’s consciousness. He’s seen Ben anguished and terrified. He’s seen Ben cry with fury until he nearly shook to pieces ( _They left me, they left me!_ ).

But everything Ben has felt until this moment has been soft, yielding. Flesh, even. This anger is _bone_.  
His nephew’s scream is a feral thing and Kitt goes _flying_ , tossed from Rey like she weighs no more than the training kit she’s clothed in. Luke realizes, vaguely, that she’s laughing, this weird hitched thing that keeps echoing over and over in the back of her throat, even as she’s pinned up to the grill of the intake duct.

“Yes!” she chokes as he stands, stalks towards her. “Yes, _yes_!”

 _Do you see it?_ Says the cold to Luke. _Do you feel it, too? He is so utterly perfect._

Luke struggles, once again, to rise against the power, because he must.

 _Thank you_ , says the voice, deep with—sincerity?--and then in one blinding moment Luke’s _free_ and it the relief of it feels exactly like a gasp of air does after eons underwater. The presence is gone.

Kitt is thoroughly human, now, trembling, shell-shocked, but Ben’s all gone on the fury and the Darkness and the way the very heart of him is crumpled in the corner. The neatness of Yala’s death, how quiet, how bloodless. Luke’s gorge rises again as he struggles to stand, sprung from his bonds; Ben is so, so wounded with the weight of those he loves, and he’s not going to _stop_.

Ben calls the saber to him. It’s a left handed grip, now, mangled stump of his right cradled in close to his chest, but Luke knows that it’ll do the job; it doesn’t take much finess for a saber to cleave a prone body in two. His eyes are wide and wild, blind; He is a tempest.

The saber flies to his hand with all the grace of a silver blaster bolt, and the movement is as fluid as breathing, catch, draw back, then the savage arc across to end it all--

 

Luke catches his hand while he’s in mid swing.

 

Luke’s never had premonitions. Never had that kind of relationship with the Force, nothing placed before him besides the yawning void of _I don’t know_. No clouded dreams, no hazy hands to guide his way with blurry intuitions. He’s never been able to see the future, but maybe what he sees in Ben’s eyes as he stands there, gripping his wrist, isn’t quite that. It’s more of something that could’ve happened, but didn’t. A little boy curling further and further in on himself in the darkness until he folds. The blue-dark of heavy rain, that ever-present, ever-awful stench of saber-cooked flesh. A red saber blade, crossed, spitting jaggedly into the night, and a sense of deeply abiding anger to match it.

A filter-warped voice, an echo of the one that Luke still hears in his dreams, sometimes:

_I will finish what you started._

Han is dead (Luke knows this with complete certainty, he does not know how), and there is a sadness so deep and wide that it might swallow a person whole. That boy who Luke knew, once, directionless, untethered. Cold and chrome and chrome and chrome stripped down until he’s something more, something better.

 

Luke stares into that terrifying blackness. Ben’s shoulders are heaving with his hot breath, hair sweaty and soaked. He looks like an animal, and no, this is not the future; somewhere, somehow, in a different place or time or dimension that Luke can’t quite manage to wrap his head around, this is what Ben _is._

Luke can’t think.

They froth at each other in emptiness, quiet save for the hum of his saber.

“ _Go to Rey_ ,” he says finally, and, mercifully, Ben does, like a rancor to its prey.

 

It’s then that Bren and Drea storm the cabin with a rush, all whimpers and cries of _Oh! Yala!_ and _master, master;_ they’d been waiting just outside, still in the hallway. Their eyes are tear-stained, their faces phlegmy, and suddenly it all becomes _real._ One of his students is dead, and his boot shuffle, arrange and rearrange, as he staggers under the weight. Bren runs to Kitt, cupping her collapsing cheeks in his hands, while Drea has run to Ben and Rey.

“Ben, oh gods, are you—is everything—“ she’s reaching out to touch the dark, quivering animal, asses with soft hands and the gentle touch of friendship, and it’s the worst idea Luke could conceive of.

“ _Don’t touch him_ ,” he hisses, and Drea spooks up, tears flying from her trembling lashes. Bren looks up, too, and suddenly Luke feels like the smallest being in the universe.

“Don’t—“ his voice is cracking. “Don’t touch him.”

Drea backs away, slow, bereft and terrified and confused, and Luke wants to crumble at the expression on her face. _That thing is not my nephew_ , he wants to cry, remembering the shape of that red saber and the sickening piles of storm-soaked bodies. _That’s not Ben!_

But there's the thing he’s choking on, something so terrible that he can barely breathe around it, standing in the wreckage of his hope:

It is. It is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you guys so much for being patient. i've kind of lost where i want this story to go/have been feeling v blocked but i wanted to at least finish this chapter  
> on another note, if i made an 8-tracks for this, would ya'll listen to it?
> 
> come chat me up @ floatin-on-bespin.tumblr.com !
> 
> comments always very appreciated!!


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tfw u dont update a fic for two years and then feel like being real masochistic after tlj drops   
> not rlly sure if im gonna keep on with this but 
> 
> here's something. uh

Luke Skywalker had been born on an asteroid like this, though nobody had thought to tell him. Obi-wan had never mentioned it, nor Lars, or Beru. Neither had Leia. Perhaps she didn’t know, either, at least anything besides the fact that the two of them had been born in secret; for all the obsession with their terrible, epic, Force-tangled lineage, there had been no concern as to _where_ the Skywalkers had sprung into existence. Maybe the knowledge had been lost in all the excitement.

So he doesn’t think of his mother when they near crash-land on the cargo pad of a tiny ore mining plant, having scrambled to a hunk of rock fifty parsecs from the Rishi Maze. Though he would have been reminded of her. Just as completely humble of a place, all rough-hewn, hunkered buildings with tiny windows to keep in light and pressure, socked into the side of a slag heap as if it had grown there. Not even enough courtesy to have breathable air, here, just a straight shot to space and the cluttered, turbulent horizon as the asteroid gently twirls and twirls, in slow combat with its orbital gravity.

Luke looks out at the stars as he shifts on his aching feet, standing beside his nephew in the observation chamber of the modest medical facility. Rey’s splayed on a table behind the little pane of transparisteel, unconscious, as the medi-droids prepare to reset her broken bone. The search for help had been blind and swift on his part, desperately groping for some sort of inhabited blip in this deeply unfamiliar corner of the universe: _OR-28b_. Mining colony. His finger had trembled as it traced across the readout, checking, then re-checking size to make sure they’d be able to accommodate—he had to slow, then stop, at the idea of trying to name the tragedy. Hurt children. _A dead one_.

Luke had heard the soft murmurs of Drea behind him, comforting Kitt, and his chest bowed inward with the weight of his sorrow; he didn’t cry on the shuttle, but it was a close thing.

 

One of the droids tenderly takes Rey’s slender, broken arm in its mandibles, and Luke tenses on instinct. The sight of Rey struggling and screaming through heavy veil of anesthesia as they reset her bone is thoroughly disturbing, and he watches every second of it. Next to him, Ben barks a wet, low sob in response, then a moan, body pushing forwards against the glass as if he wants to steal her—take her from this desolate place and leave the rest behind, the ship, his friends, all of it—and Luke puts a hand on his shoulder, trying to soothe the refracted pain.

“ _Don't_ ,” Ben snarling, twisting away. His own right hand is bound to his chest by a sling, artificial fingers grafted to the crisped stumps: middle, ring, and pinky, still probably tingling with the newness of the artificial skin as his nerve endings search for fresh connections. Lucky he didn’t end up with salvaged hooks for fingers, on a facility like this. Luke remembers the discomfort of his own hand, which aches in sympathy where it’s been shrugged away. He squeezes it into a fist. The leather glove creaks.

“We’ll go home,” he says, trying for fatherly, like he sounds like he has any idea what’s happening, or what to do. “She’s going to be fine.” The words sound stale in his mouth as he says them.

 

Ben knows this, and says nothing.

 

The droids deliver Rey on the stretcher like some sort of pale, shrunken offering, which Ben rushes to immediately. The one with the mandibles slips the intravenous drip from her forearm while the chief medical officer addresses Luke, its humanoid face plate gleaming eerily in the oily yellow light, pockmarked, abused by its long life.

“With rest, she will make a full recovery,” it warbles; it speaks in some kind of off-brand droid tongue that takes Luke back decades, and which he can only partially decipher.

“Thank you, truly,” Luke breathes, bowing, because he thinks a Jedi master would do that—not that service droids from the asscrack of deep space would be versed in old myths. “And the boy?”

It pauses for a moment, giving a long static-sigh of feedback. “I utilized my limited resources to the best of my capabilities,” it finally says, or something to that effect, then gives a stiff, dismissive nod, and reverses towards its chambers.

Luke hopes for the best.

Ben takes Rey in his good arm as best he can, of course, slipping his bad one from his sling to hold her to his chest, chin hooked over shoulder, knees framed limply around hips. Luke follows behind and watches her tiny legs dangling down as she sluggishly whimpers and shifts, trying to shake the haze of drugs in her system. Heavy, numbing painkillers. Luke wants some. Her tips of her little socked feet can touch the corridor on either side as they zig-zag through the bunker, breathing in the black oily smell of refinement chemicals, as if Luke is following his nephew into the underworld. Ben just soldiers on, keeping her close as they slip and away towards the launch pad, Bren, Drea, and Kitt marching grimly behind. There’s one fewer set of feet, and silence presses down, down on Luke’s temples and shoulders, hunching him.

 

At the airlock, Ben pauses, trying to figure out how to key the door open with the cumbersome load in his arms. Luke reaches out.

“Here, I’ll—“

“Don’t touch her,” his nephew says, and he doesn’t even sound angry, just deeply exhausted-- and maybe that hurts more. He hits the switch with his hip, and the lock doors pull open with a rusty lurch.

 

He boards the shuttle where his friend was slain, body bundled away into one of the cargo holds like so much space detritus. Rey moans in his grasp, sensing their shared grief, as Luke follows them both, arms old and empty and helpless.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come yell at me for this shit @floatin-on-bespin on tumblr like please i need it


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Rey POV chapter!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> merry christmas to all you poor bastards still reading this fic!! unbeta'd as per usual 
> 
> i also wanted to say thank you SO much for all the supremely kind words and support i received on the most recent chapter. you have no idea how much those comments have meant to me. thank you to everyone who has stuck with me throughout the trainwreck of this story. gonna try to keep chugging along

Rey has been loved, absolutely, since the moment she was conceived.

From darkness the bond bloomed in a hot-quick instant and the love followed on its heels, a warm tide that coursed naturally through the waters of the ordinary womb that carried her. Remained around her still, even after she breathed and screamed and cried out with all the discomfort of living for the very first time. _Love_ \-- it constantly pushed against the most tender parts of her with a comforting, heavy weight, which quenched her squealing cries as a baby and rocked her, gently, to sleep each night. Her parents had been nobody; her cradle, the belly of a starship cruiser, the flat, rough palms and wide fingers of working hands as she was passed about. Alien providence sparsely murmured in a dozen different dialects, clickity droid fingers to swaddle and bathe her.

There had been no poetry to her infancy.

But this love was never nameless. Rey had whispered this to Ben one night, not long after she had first learned how to swap the gauzy, intimate figments of their shared ideas for words that could be used with everyone else. Slow, clumsy, but necessary. Using spoken words with Ben had been novel at the time, and she whispered them deliberately over the moon-silvered bedding that lay in soft peaks between them. Even in the furthest-back, most careworn reaches of her memory, the old moments that have been replayed to thin translucency:

_I knew you._

She watched him blink in the dark. The thing named Father, named Mother, or a short, soft syllable that her mouth was quickly learning to shape around and savor as she said it. Her wholeness, born into the world long before her, tucked a spilt lock of her hair behind her ear and whispered to her of how he will stay after her, too, though only by a narrow margin. Just to bracket his life around hers, he implied tacitly, a guilty little thought to be slipped gently beneath her consciousness. So that she might never live one minute without the insistence of that love. The rich grain of it, pressing into her body and mind so deeply that she can feel it prickle in the pink webbing between her fingers, the space behind her eyes.

Rey’s face had wrinkled, concerned, for a second, about the idea of leaving him behind, but he reassured her with scant a brush against her mind. Surely, Ben Solo couldn’t exist long in a world without Rey in it; the ten years shouldered alone were his limit. If she died, he would, too, he swore, with a tight mouth and the kind of stubborn certainty that only small children and young men can have. The breeze sighed outside the sleeping porch and two of them, three and thirteen, began stoically discussing the intricacies of how they’d die; there was no terror to it, only peace and certainty.

 

When Kitt is taken on Luke’s ship, for a moment, just one split-instant, Rey thinks of that. The air smells like charred flesh, ugly, unmistakable, and she wonders if she or Ben will die first.

 

Kitt had casually approached the table where Rey had been sandwiched between Yala and Ben, feeling happy, surrounded, like the brook that gurgled at the bottom of the steep canyon on their island. They’d just started scoping out the nooks and crannies of the universe via the projected map offered by the little table, scouting a path through the back end of the Atollon system, which Ben claimed to have seen as a child. Semi-illegally, of course, something about an ore shipment from another part of the galaxy that needed to be slipped under the upturned noses of the local bureaucrats. Cash in specific pockets, a little bit of the return skimmed off the top. Shady, exciting business. The parts of the universe that had known Ben before she did were an endless fascination to Rey; she demanded that the stories from Han Solo’s backwater freight routes be told over and over, until she could imagine them to her own level of satisfaction (the number of parsecs it took for them to make the Kessell Run changed with every iteration of the story, but she didn’t mind).

The three of them had been circling around a planet in the Lothal Sector, outer rim, where Ben said they had stayed—hid out—for a few nights. Yala’s fingers played at the controls to push and pull at the fabric of the tiny galay so Rey could see it up-close. The texture of the planet spun, bright, full of potential, and she pushed the tip of her finger through the center of it, just to see how it made her flesh glow blue—and then Kitt emerged from the other side, face visible somewhere through the space between stars. The light looked weird, rippling through the dints and hollows of her soft face as she moved forwards slowly, deliberately.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Some hunk of rock,” said Yala, still fiddling with the latitude and longitude of the map. “Ben’s been there on space pirate business, apparently.”

Rey giggled; Ben sighed.

Yala grinned to Ben over Rey’s head. “What? It’s true.” Then he stilled; Kitt’s had come to rest on his shoulder. A strange gesture. The hair on the back of Rey’s neck stood up, and she could feel Ben’s do the same. Their twinned heartbeat picked up.

 

“If I do this now,” Kitt said, weird and quiet, “I hope you’ll forgive me, later.”

 

And so, with Yala’s warmth still pressed to her side, Rey watched as the blue blade ignited through his chest like a divine spear. A shaft of blinding deliverance that bisected him from hip to shoulder and singed Rey with its nearness.

 

 

The air smells like split ozone and she chokes on it and thinks of how their end will have to be a one-two synchopated beat, because neither could live without the other.

 

Things are happening too quickly to register their grief: Yala, dead, Ben, pushing her up against the humming, warm interior of the ship so he might protect her with his own body. The sense of wrong is overwhelming—Kitt’s intricate force signature has been wiped away and in its place, something much colder permeates the tiny cabin, making them crazy. She knows this, she _knows_ this, the thing that’s haunted Ben for years like a bad star hung over the place of his birth. The idea of seeing it in Kitt’s body sickens her and fascinates her in equal turns. She peeks, just for a moment, around Ben’s flank and sees just the uncurled knot of Yala’s fist, lax in death where he’s splayed across the floor.

Her brother. The one who’d played with her and carried her from babyhood, always the one running ahead, teasing and pinching and loving her sweetly. Whose lekku she had loved to wrap around her neck and cuddle close to. Strong, willful Yala.

She thinks of how Ben told her, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he would not go somewhere she couldn’t follow. That if she was to pass from this world he would be in the next one, with her, in an instant.

But that doesn’t mean her heart can’t hurt in other monstrous ways.

 

She sobs, and the tears blend it all into a painful, jarring pastiche. Luke’s there, then Luke’s on the ground, looking tiny and old, force presence pinioned by the Kitt-thing as it waits there with the saber held high. Ben’s head is everywhere at once, probing at Rey, trying to calm her and make sure she isn’t shitting herself in fear, which she isn’t, but she’s close. She’s trying to understand what’s happening, cheek pressed against the rough back of Ben’s tunic, body formed to his back completely. If she had her way, she’d be the one protecting him—but she’ll have to wait till she’s taller. She fully expects to outgrow him, one day, and suddenly her heart twists further in anguish; they might never get there.

 

There’s cold seeping up her arm, like she stuck it into one of the tidepools at the shore back home, brisk morning salt-shivery.

 

 _Hello, little one_ , the Kitt-thing murmurs to her, but without speaking, like how Ben can. The feeling is disturbing, icy, but not—wrong. It’s not wrong enough and Rey hates herself for embracing the presence on instinct, just for a moment. Like cupping cold metal in her palm, putting a frozen slug of it inside her hot little mouth to savor the texture of it.

 _I know your boy is special to you_.

_I’m sorry._

Then her wrist snaps in two places and she’s blind with the pain of it. Ben is screaming, saber flying to his hands as if from nowhere, Rey can’t see where it came from as they fight and claw at each other. Ben falls, pain of his hand slashing through Rey in turn where she lies already crippled.

But the most sickening of all: the weird, sudden snarl in their bond. As she drifts to and from consciousness, streaking through the stars at light speed and beyond, the sudden absence is what untethers her completely; with wild eyes and lank, dark hair, the thing that flew to her aid was unnamed, unknowable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> find me at floatin-on-bespin.tumblr.com as per usual! hope you all have a safe and (happier than this chapter) holiday <3


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> another short chapter this time! sorry yall. wrote this while curled up during fucking freezing weather. trying to get this story rolling again one little bit at a time. 
> 
> once again, all of the feedback and loving comments have been HUGE. thank you thank you thank you for every single one. you guys are amazing.

They will cremate Yala’s body, as per Luke’s crumpled handful of half-remembered Jedi teachings. They way he burned his father’s; how he would’ve burned Obi-Wan’s, if he hadn’t given himself over to the force. It’s rainy season on the island again when they do it, a few days after returning home, at the end of a weird grey margin in the grieving period that has left their little community rung out with sadness and tears. Nobody sure where to go or what to do.

The sky hangs purple overhead as Luke and some of the older padawans work to pull together a pyre of rough driftwood from the beach. The craggy pile rests on a lip of dirt and grasses that sticks out above the tidepools, a little shelf on a secluded border of their home. Rey had chosen the spot, small and quiet where she was tucked against Ben’s leg—a place she hasn’t inhabited in years, but that she hasn’t been able to leave over the past few days. She watches with the other young ones as Luke and Ben and the rest numbly move the rough, stringy pieces of driftwood into place. They’ve been stained dark by weeks of rain, heavy and fragrant, prickling splinters into soft hands. His nephew is far more than strong enough, now, to use the force to move them, but Ben had started piling the wood this way, and Luke had followed his lead. This is something that you need your hands to do correctly, somehow. A funeral; one of the most base rituals of all life.

He lays the sodden wood up against the swaddled, cobbled-together shape of his student’s body, and keeps moving despite the weight of the shame. The edges of his sleeves are damp and cold against his wrists. He tries to forget how Yala had looked when he’d found the pieces of old cloth to wrap him in, maybe robes, once, or maybe something else. Functional, coarse cloth to hold him into one shape, even as he had been split down the middle in two.

When the pile is done, a satisfactory enough shape against the low light of the horizon, the soft murmurs of his students fall away, and Luke steps back. The near silence is shocking, only the sound of the ocean slapping its palms on the flat, worn rocks beneath to fill the gaps between. This is something that needs to be done. He grips the torch at his belt, hidden under his robes, but the wood is slick and dark. Too wet to burn properly.

As if on cue, the sky, pregnant until that very moment, begins to break open. Fat, doleful drops patter on Luke’s nose, the parting of his hair, loud where they thwack the broad, waxy leaves of the forest behind them. The pyre sits dark and silent. He licks his wetted lips; the rain begins to fall in earnest.

A feeling like a pane of glass or ice or something brittle, snapped into two clean pieces. Ben doesn’t tumble down where he stands so much as he—sags. One-two of his knees in the marshy grass, nothing graceful about it at all, grief making his body awkward, and heavy. Then his hands are on the ground, too, big hands kneading and clawing at the dirt as his fists make ripe ripping sounds as he tears up the grass by its roots. _Oh, Ben,_ sighs Luke’s heart, as he watches broad shoulders jerk with ugly sobs. His nephew has never been able to resist scalding himself on the intensity of his emotions, not once. Stood far too close to the flame, ever since he was nine and drifting through the galaxy with neither compass nor tether. Now, perhaps, he’s twinned with it; in the ship, Luke felt how he’d reached into himself and held the coal of his rage with his bare hand. Worryingly no longer two separate entities. Luke hates that he sounds like the decrepit memories of his masters and their masters, and the ones that came in the lineage further back than his own memory can reach. He hates the terror of what Ben has the potential to become.

 

But in this moment, how badly he wants to join him, there on the ground, to cry.

 

 _Psssah_ —the driftwood is expelling the water like a fogged-up breath, a fine mist whisping up into a spray and away into the sea breeze. The sticks crackle and shiver, rub against each other, anxious as they’re wrung dry by the invisible grip of the force.

Luke turns: Kitt, hand held low but with clear intention. Her face is wet, blanked by tears. She slowly draws the moisture up, up, with touch that’s so powerful but so delicate that Luke feels the hum of her power vibrate deep beneath his sternum, between all their bodies where they stand. Silver and quick, undeniably her. Somebody whimpers. Suddenly, she flicks her wrist, like fingers wiping sweat from a laden brow, and the water is gone. The wood has been dried, absolutely. Likely all the rotting blood in Yala’s body has dried as well, through Luke’s stomach twists to think it.

And then comes Rey. It starts with Ben, at first, a faint vapor flowing from his hunched form that Luke tries to blink the water from his eyes to see. A fullbody halo, warm colored like an afterimage after staring at the sun too long. Then he’s being engulfed, too, and he can feel it blanketing in overtop of them all; maybe she doesn’t even mean to do it. Like a beam of warmth, cast on their heads and shoulders and the tops of their feet in a way that feels almost spiritual, like a deliverance. Luke looks up; the rainfall has stopped above their little huddled mass, evaporating before it can touch them. He looks to Rey, who is crying, openly, even as the heat brims, golden, from her body. She moves suddenly to Ben, who brings her down against him to hold tight, as she casts her light about them.

 

Luke thinks of the time in his bedroom, all those years and years ago, and the way the force has a curious way of tangling around certain people.

 

Luke can feel the little gear-teeth of the ignition beneath his fingerprint as he thumbs the torch awake. The red flame leaps up, as if joyful. He kneels gravely to his duty.

 

The smell of burning humanoid flesh is a completely singular experience, an intense thing that cannot be replicated, and Luke hates how familiar the smell has become to him. Even more, he hates that Ben and Rey have learned it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> always love to hear feedback and speculation as per usual <3


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little bit of a longer chapter for you guys this time!! unbeta'd as hell!!!! what am i even doing at this point
> 
> thank you thank you for all the comments, as usual

His sister tells him, in her own blunted, careworn manner, that she sort of knew this was going to happen. The image of her holoprojection is cold and small in the palm of his hand and her clutch on his heart is hot, like a little persistent grip through the current of the force. Rain whips the roof and walls of his chambers as it beats the cowed, dark earth below into submission. Yala’s ashes have since been churned into the mud.

“You’re a myth,” she crackles. “Did you think everyone else wasn’t going to notice?”

Her and Han’s visit has aged by several years, and Luke thinks that they’re desperately in need of a new one. She’s got her hair done differently, tucked up against her neck, but before he’d been able to comment on it, she’d cut him off at the pass. Diplomatic. Despite the grain of the image, he can tell that her structured robe fits too loosely at her hips. He can’t imagine the galaxy’s load has been an easy one to shoulder; he feels a pang of guilt at sloughing off the weight of it.

He wonders what star-dusty corner Han is poking around in as they speak.

“I could feel it in the force, even just when you went off world. A tug.”

Luke’s wistful mind re-focuses and realizes that Leia’s telling him that his presence is loud—that t _hey_ , his little enclave that he’s built out here on the edge of space, are collectively loud, a beacon in an era with the light turned off. Dim, and un-illuminated, copies of the Jedi texts flaking away in a chest of Luke’s somewhere. Dumb to the learnings of the force-- or so some say. He isn’t so sure of that anymore. He shivers on his thin bedroll where he’s laying on his side, heavy head propped on his unoccupied hand.

“Someone else is feeling the pull of those strings. And apparently my son—“ her voice breaks, or it could just be the static “—is a part of that attraction.”

“It’s not Ben’s fault,” Luke counters.

“Of course it’s not.” At once, her tone is that of a mother, rushed and assertive, no longer the General, though Luke finds there is little difference between the two titles. He chews over his words for a moment before speaking. The rain hisses in the space between his breaths.

“I saw something disturbing,” he says. She gives him a silence as a signal to continue.

“When he rose up to protect Rey, I saw Ben in some kind of future. I don’t know how to make sense of it.” He tells her of the darkness and red kyber nightmarish fugue, of Han being inexplicably dead, and the dogged fixation of a young man, ruined. The details of his vision taste metallic-tangy and too sharp on his tongue, burned flesh and scar tissue, tough to articulate, but to spare Leia any detail would be stupid.

“Could it be….where he’s going?” He finally asks lamely, at the end. _Where he_ could’ve _been going, if not for Rey’s light?_ Or is he just doomed to it at the sick ending of it all, no matter what Luke or his mother or a bunch of old Jedi ghost-farts have to say?

“Could be. But while that’s disturbing, I’ll say this: visions have only ever gotten you into trouble.”

“…True.” It’s strange, he thinks, that for some, the Force opens the slipstream of time a narrow, fortuitous crack, but at the end of the day, it never seems to be of use to anyone at all. _Maybe we’ve just been reading it wrong all along. Maybe it’s the issue of translation._

“Be wary of Jedi mind tricks.” Luke thinks he can see a smile in the pixelated shadow where her mouth should be. “And Ben has Rey, you know. And you to thank for that.”

“I’m—“

“I think they would’ve come together one way or another, but you took her in. You've given them a place to build whatever it is they have. I can’t even describe it. But Luke,” she says, lowly, “I’ve come to the slow realization that their connection, whatever it is, is _good_. And that it has been my privilege to witness it, in some way.

“As it’s been for me,” he replies, thinking of the golden children.

“I wish… I could see it with my own eyes.”

“Me too.” _They’re beautiful and terrible to watch_ , he wants to say, but Leia knows this already. Her own son, struck by the force, entwined with it, enmeshed in its erratic will.

“Ben will be safe,” she carefully concludes, “as long as Rey’s there to hold him close to her. And the rest—the rest will come. I grieve with all of you, but I can only implore you. Please. Keep teaching your students.”

“I don’t feel worthy.”

Her sigh is weary and static-ed, and Luke hears the echo of every bureaucratic ghost that’s held her station. “Were we ever?” she asks.

A smuggler. A farmboy. The princess of a cold, nebulous cloud of spacedust that was a planet, once.

“Not particularly.”

“Train them in Yala’s memory, Luke,” she says. “The universe has so little hope, right now. You have to-- keep trying.” Even with hardly any light of her own left to spare, she’s still throwing him scraps. Luke thinks of when he first saw his sister, decades and decades prior, on R2’s little tape.

 

He wouldn’t deign to consider himself her only hope, now, but damn near one of the best they’ve got.

 

They say their goodbyes and he shuts off the projection. The little room falls abruptly dark, like a closed mouth. Luke’s bones creak as he rolls slowly over onto his back to stare at the ceiling, hands coming to rest on his stomach. He doesn’t deserve Leia, he thinks. Hands rising and falling with every breath, rain beating out a steady rhythm on the roof, he falls into a meditative sleep without meaning to. Heavy sleep, sedated with world-weariness, echoing with some sort of refrain that repeats in his mind without origin:

 

_Darkness rises, and light to meet it._

 

\--

 

 

The years pass slowly, and with a wounded gait. But they do pass. Their tiny community tries hard to heal the little hole in the middle of it, flesh clenching and clawing around a metal slug as the skin thickens overtop. This struggle gets easier, slowly, slowly, as it becomes apparent that Yala isn’t gone, in fact, at all. A few months after his death, padawans begin to share stories: the feeling of an arm gracing around their shoulder if they’re sitting alone in the quad, or a gentle hand wiping sweat from their brow when they pause in their training, saber held high. Once, while diving, one of the younger ones get caught in a bad tide but reports the feeling of a hand around their ankle like deliverance, dragging them to the surface. Yala’s friends are fortified by the knowledge that he’s with them. The land knows it, too; two years, and tree is twisting up where his pyre once stood, a hardy species native to their island. He has become folded into their collective force presence, which is knitting stronger every day. Rey seems particularly attuned to him, and is one of the first to reach out to him while meditating; sometimes, Luke watches her emerge from her deep breathing exercises with wet eyes and a bit-back smile, and wonders what they talked about.

 

 _He says it’s nice there_ , she whispers, once, when Luke asks offhandedly. _And that he misses us._

Rey’s power is growing with her, leaving her master a little awed and a little terrified, just as he’s always been with Ben. The two of them get in a tiff, one day after a long day of training, Rey twelve and brimming with all the spite of the world and Ben yielding to it but only to a point. The fight had burst out just at dusk, shouting openly on the little path behind the dorms, the ferns that grow over the stones shivering around their ankles with the salty evening breeze. Something about being fucking stubborn, about endangering yourself beyond sane reason. Luke will be sheepishly filled in on the details later; she’d been out crawling around in some of the sea-cliff caves with a few others. Kid stuff. But all that matters now is that Rey is mad and Ben is _more_ mad and it’s a little bit terrifying when two halves of a whole come together in discord.

“What if the tide had come in, huh?” Ben says, pushing a hand through his hair and scrunching its length up in a frustrated ball at his nape. At twenty two he’s grown into his lopsided features almost completely, touching closer and closer to handsome with each passing year. Luke sees a lot of Han in him—sometimes too much. He looks on from his leaned place against a pillar on the porch, honestly not sure if he should intervene.

“It wasn’t gonna come in. We checked the tide chart.” Rey says this like she’s explaining it to an insipid youngling.

Ben clearly doesn’t appreciate this. He swings one arm at the sky, which is deepening into violet sleep, stars winking out above the ocean. “Does this look like paying attention to the tide chart? Keeping track of time?”

One of the younger girls who’d also gone, only a bit older than Rey, finds the surprising courage to speak up, robe hem squeezed tightly in nervous hands: “We’re sorry, Ben. It was a dumb idea to go. I shouldn’t have been there. _She_ shouldn’t have—“

“Oh, don’t,” Ben barks, shuttering the conversation without looking away from Rey. He advances towards her, and for a second, Luke feels a little trickle of fear in his gut at how truly huge the difference is between them, tiny girl and towering man, heads taller than her and twice as broad. “You know better,” Ben says, terse, face craning down to regard her, expression curtained by his dark hair. Rey is looking very, very hard at his boots, which are large enough that she could stand on top of them with her own (the way she used to when she wanted to reach his ears) and still have room to spare.

The only thing that’s keeping Luke from pulling Ben away is the idea that maybe this has gone on before, as it surely as to have, but nobody else has been privy to see it. Friction lit and extinguished in the link between them, always re-centering on the warm wash of forgiveness and love.

Rey will be a teenager, soon; Luke suddenly doesn’t envy Ben one bit.

 

“Rey. Look at me.” Ben reaches for her arm. She gives a wordless, feral shout, all fury and heart.

 

The pane of transparisteel in the adjacent dorm window shatters.

 

Birds cackle from the treetops above, filling the stunned silence. Rey will later blubber and apologize to Luke himself, of course, too full of tears to get many words out besides _sorry_ and _I really, really didn’t mean to, I don’t know why that happened_ , but for now she just hides, embarrassed and scared, in Ben’s arms.

Silently, Ben picks her up, and Luke can hear the quiet, remorseful sobs as they get muffled against the crook of his neck. Rey’s legs wrap around his waist automatically, as they always have, as he takes her away down the path, towards the jungle.

 

Luke isn’t sure where they go, but he doesn’t ask.

 

They’re both in the eating quarters the next morning, Rey looking a little overgrown in Ben’s lap, quietly nibbling her bowl of fruit and milk in the circle of his breakfast-occupied arms.

 

The world seems peaceful enough.

 

 

On his part, Luke has begun to interrogate the _why_ and _where_ and _how_ of their mission more than ever. Something dark is gathering up black cloaks of power about its flanks on the horizon. The cold presence hasn’t disturbed any of his students since the incident on the ship, and he suspects that its eyes are turned elsewhere, right now. Preoccupied. But the interplay of dark and light and the long, repetitive trawl of time continues on, and Luke Skywalker and his band of children—no, now no longer children, they’re pupils, young people in his tutelage—stand as some kind of revenant.

This becomes clearer than ever through his sister’s correspondence. Leia keeps in touch, though more with Luke than her own son, who draws into himself and into Rey so deeply some days that Luke has to work to dig him out. Not hearing Luke when he speaks, sometimes, spending entire days with Rey, alone. Perhaps it’s not the same as it was, once, in the dark, pre-Rey days, but some kind of cousin to that stilted rankling in his own skin. The other students are getting restless, too, especially the older ones; they’ve been versed in combat and force-sense and even diplomacy as best as Luke can teach them, but they haven’t been able to actually tangibly _use_ any of it. Each time he thinks of sending them off-planet, all he can think of is the terrible sound of Rey’s arm as it broke, the weird sound of Kitt’s not-voice. The feeling of failure.

 

Leia calls one day and says the First Order has annexed a resource-rich system in the mid-rim using armed aggression. Blockades and starvation tactics. She calls again in a week. Three million life-forms, dead.

 

But she didn’t have to tell Luke that; he can feel it in the force. A sense of heaviness, of slow mourning. Sadness lays over the academy like a veil, and even the dawn, which Luke rises with, seems dimmed by it.

 

Kitt cuts Luke off one morning on his way to coach some of the younger students through meditation. She turns out from behind a corner, quick and smooth as a shadow, and it’s enough to make Luke jump. “We need to do something,” she says. Her boots crunch in the gravel as she sets her heels into it.

 

“I’m sorry?”

 

“Send me off world, Master.”

 

“Kitt—“

 

“I can’t be here another minute.”

 

Another student appears at her side, and then others are coming in from the quad, out from the dorms. It doesn’t feel like a coup, precisely, though Luke should probably feel that way. The little crowd of older padawans poses awkwardly before him, robes rustling, humble fabrics patched and re-patched over the years. Rey peeks out from behind Ben, who’s standing near the back. He can sense their collective agitation, their uncertainty, but more than that, their _need_. The sheer insistence of their young life force, white-hot and shivering with vitality. He thinks of Yala, and of the fact that he might be standing with them, even now.

 

“How can you ignore what’s happening around us?” Kitt asks. “Can’t you feel it, too?”

 

“Yes.” _More than you know._

“Then why are we stuck on this star-forsaken hunk of rock??” The trees in the forest sway and groan, as if insulted.

 

“I only want to keep you—safe. All of you,” Luke says, voice faltering, and he kicks himself for being so vulnerable, but also is entirely unable to help it. He knows they’re all thinking of what happened years ago, Kitt more than anyone. “If anything happened again, I don’t think I could forgive myself.”

 

Her face twists. “Selfish,” she says.

 

“Is it?” Luke whispers, mostly to himself, because he knows she’s right. He finds Rey’s face among the crowd, who nods to him, just slightly, sage and strange beyond her years. _We are stronger than you think._

 

“I’ll leave on my own, then,” Kitt spits, probably taking Luke’s quiet for dismissal. “The universe is tearing itself apart one second at a time and I’m not going to just stand here and _watch_.” Her voice sounds wet, ready to break open into tears.

 

Luke sighs, then fumbles at the clasp of his robe with his dead right hand, before the whole heavy, woolen weight of it falls to the dust. His saber flies to his other hand, and he holds it low, ready. He finds himself smiling a little, unable to help himself; Kitt stands before him, and she’s entirely who Luke Skywalker was, once upon a time.

 

“If you’re all so ready to fight the galaxy,” he says, drawing into a defensive stance, “then you have to show me, first.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i drew a lil piece of art for this fic here: http://floatin-on-bespin.tumblr.com/post/169511112984/a-potential-deleted-scene-from-my-reylo-soulbond !
> 
> ((if anyone ever drew art for this fic i'd marry them just sayin))
> 
> comments are super duper welcome as always


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> another chapter!
> 
> here we go, folks: warnings for mentions of underaged sexuality 
> 
> unbeta'd

Luke wins.

 

‘Course he does. He takes a staggering step back, leaning unsteadily on his heels as his saber tip swings away from Kitt’s exposed throat and slips back into its hilt. He feels the way a planet must when it shifts in its orbit, heavier than anything, ancient. Hero of another era. Sweat stings his eyes. He won the duel, by the skin of his teeth, if only because he’s not sure what would’ve happened if he hadn’t; if he could’ve looked Ben in the face, held Rey in his arms.

 

He reaches down and grasps Kitt’s hand, pulling her back to standing with some effort. It’s been a while—more than a while—since he’s moved beyond just the _theory_ of what being a Jedi is and actually put it into practice. The students spar with each other more these days than they do with him, his body remote and closed off from theirs. Kitt tosses his hand away once she’s up, and he grimaces; all that meditating has put a little more weight around the middle and shallowness in his lungs than he’d like.

 

She surveys him silently, weight of her gaze twinned and multiplied by the other students standing witness in a loose ring around them. They’re watching him; he’s watching her. There’s a scuff of dirt on her face, a string of curls plastered to her cheek with the salt of her hard work, and without thinking, Luke reaches out to cup it. Surprisingly, she lets him.

 

She hadn’t made it easy for him. Her swings were savage, staggeringly heavy, weighted with her youth and her rage at the _injustice_ of it all—and where Ben Kenobi might have told her, once, to suppress the feelings, Luke had let her bare her teeth and cuss. She’d actually gotten him pretty hard in the hip with one knee when he went to parry a blow, and he’d sworn some himself. A quick hiss under his breath-- _Kriff!_ suddenly feeling younger than he had in decades. Aching, older than the stars.

 

“So you’re going to keep us trapped on this island, forever?” she asks, words reedy, childish, eyes tight in a way that Luke knows means she wants to cry, but is working hard to hold it back. When did he teach them that to cry is to show weakness? He pushes a thumb gently into the dint between her eye and nose and lets a tear pool on wetly on his skin.

Another saber blazes into existence with a hum. Luke glances up to see Ben slip forwards from the rest, stance conflicted, ready and not ready. Lit blue-blazing and hellish by the weapon in his hands.

“Ben!” Rey barks. Someone else keeps her from lunging forwards, a sweep of robes, and she strains against their arms.

“I can’t let you do this, Uncle. If you’re going keep us here, you’ll have to fight me, too.” He takes a shuddering breath. “I won’t let you bar us from leaving this place.”

 

There’s a pregnant silence, birds gone quiet overhead, tensions swirling between all of them in a bubble poised to flex its delicate membrane and explode into-- something. Violence. A reluctant mutiny.

A _resistance_.

In a lightning strike through the core of his body, Luke feels so absurdly _proud._ So proud he could split from his skin. So proud you could see the shine of it across the breadth of the arms of the galaxy, if you squinted.

He grins.

 

They work together do decide how this new Jedi order is going to be run. They all sit around on cushions, placed in a circle on the floor of the classroom, vaguely modeled after some old illustrations Luke had seen of the Jedi Council on Coursecant. Even the younglings, the ones who’re Rey’s age, though they’re sort of shuffled into the corners by their elders and told to shut up and listen. They talk from dawn to dusk. Kitt insists that they make return of the Jedi public. Some agree. Some disagree. Luke comes up with the idea to send them out in pairs, the way Old Ben told Luke that he used to do it with his master, then with his father. Back when there were enough Jedi that you could pair them; they create teams out of the older students and there’s some sort of comfort in this that Luke, the sole remainder for far too long, takes secret, special joy in.

 

Ben brushes his shoulder purposefully against Luke’s when they all shuffle back to the dorms for bed, chattering, weary, but buzzing with excitement.

Rey comes from behind to squeeze his hand. “Thank you,” she says, simply, before walking off into the orange-lamplit night, Ben at her side.

 

And so the oldest students take on their new mantel eagerly, ready to visit the surrounding planets, to learn there and help heal conflicts. Of course, there’s the issue of transportation; the old junker Luke flew all those years ago is neither fit for heavy travel nor conducive to pleasant memories, and it becomes immediately apparent that they need to find—or make-- more. Luke reaches out to friends he hasn't talked to in years, feeling around through his contacts for spare parts and scrap, half-heap star-jumpers someone might have rotting in a garage somewhere. Wedge, long since retired on Hosnian Prime as a flight instructor, is overjoyed to hear that Luke is alive and immediately offers two of their old drill transports. Another old buddy of Uncle Lars’ offers to ship over the parts from her junk shop that don’t sell. Even Han comes through—literally, Falcon full of odds and ends acquired through uncertain means and Chewie piloting an old Correllian thing just waiting to be refurbished.

It feels good to see Han again. It’s even better to see how Ben is his father’s height, now, or even taller, when they finally embrace. He stays for dinner, Rey returning his sharp remarks blow for blow while Ben chats with Chewie, and it’s one of the happiest nights Luke has for months.

Before they leave, Han and Chewie help them set up a garage in an old converted power silo that’s stood derelict for years not far from the dorms. Not long after that, the first of his students leave, carrying with them open eyes, clear minds. The spark to light the slightest whisper among the starts, to herald the arrival of a subtly gaining shift: _hope is coming._

 

A year passes. Another. The classroom is now decorated with findings from nearby star systems, gifts from locals as thanks for solving disputes or helping with tasks. Each month brings new stories and fresh smiles: Kitt and her partner nearly get eaten by some kind of subterranean worm-creature while travelling on foot from one village to another on a nearby planet, but come out laughing. Someone mistakes an animal being carried off by a predator for a human baby and nearly gets lost in the jungle for their trouble. Scars earned, sweat shed.

Meanwhile, Rey, who had taken a special interest in the their tiny fleet immediately, is becoming wickedly proficient at building and repairing the ships. Ben has let her fly some of them, more than once, and Luke admits that he can almost see a little Skywalker in her blood, the way she turns against the swell of the sky. Or Solo, perhaps. She and Ben spend every spare hour in the garage together, her still-planet bound by age and him by proxy, working on the ships. Luke often sticks his head inside the bay doors to find two sets of feet, one big one small, poking out from beneath the belly of a cruiser. The air peppered with guttural curses, handed down lovingly from Chewie, specifically tailored to this part or that.

 

Reports from the padawans on other planets keeps him busier than ever, too busy, for once, to feel the sluggishness of age. Rey and Ben anxiously await the day they’ll be able to adventure with the rest-- but he enjoys keeping his eye on them until then.  

 

 

 

 

Rey’s fourteen when she runs away.

Luke senses that something’s up _immediately._ He nearly drops his tea, startling the padawan who’s consulting him on saber building, drawing her eyes wide and making her step back. The morning is grey and placid, dewy with the freshness of the day, his students sprinkled in half a dozen nearby systems like a constellation in his consciousness. And there: rolling across their collective sphere of Light, a sense of anger, of fear, that’s as dark and pregnant with violence as a tropical thunderhead. Deep purple, crackling, a herald of turbulence.

“I’m sorry,” he says to the padawan, who’s similarly bewildered. “I just need to—“ he trails off as he reaches out to it, this terrible feeling, trying to suss out the meaning of it.

Ben, undeniably.

It’s electric as he brushes against his nephew’s distinct Force signature, static-stinging, spark and prickle. The blood of Luke’s blood, and it’s _boiling_. He hasn’t projected like this in _years_. In the periphery, Luke can feel how Ben’s anguish is actually hurting the other padawans with the force of it, the physical pain and sickness of dozens of beings lacquering the gush of Ben’s oppressive, swollen presence. Ben Solo on a good day can be a tempest, but this-- without thinking, Luke reaches out to stifle the source of it.   

_STOP._

It’s like quenching an ember in his palm. Tamping him down is the smell of cauterized flesh, the blindness of white-hot pain, and yet.

Yet. Luke knows this. Ben might be a young man ablaze but Luke—well, he’s _himself_ , he supposes, able to be old and calm and slaking as the sea, encompassing all of that terrible rage and panic with practiced ease. Pacifying Ben as he did when he was so young, so troubled, each slow and measured breath dissipating the knotted cloud, cooling everything by degrees until slowly, slowly, there is room for language.

Luke gathers up the panting remains. The ash, the helplessness.

_Shh. Shh, Ben, it’s alright._

From the bottom of the smoldering crater: a voice, thin and broken.

_She’s gone!_

At once, the world is real again.

“--er Luke. Master Luke? Are you okay?” The padawan’s brow is furrowed, one hand to her temple, as if she has a nasty headache; the poor girl is utterly confused, both by her master and the strange ringing left by Ben and his drama. Luke has time for nothing more than a curt _yes_ —he’s already walking swiftly away from the pavilion, spilled tea and shattered ceramic cold and forgotten on the tile, robes swirling behind him.

He has somewhere to be.

Could she still be on the island? Luke starts combing the forests and beaches, reaching out to try and find her. Their island isn’t sprawling, but it’s a jungle, after all, and one that’s certainly large enough to pose danger. Plenty of ravines to fall into, broken arms and broken ankles. Plenty of hungry beasts. colored brightly with strange poisons, lurking in the underbrush. Her force signature is faint and trembling. Receding.

 _Shit._ Luke doubles his speed, already anticipating the empty space in the garage.

 

 

 

“Do you have any idea why?” Luke finally asks, exasperated with Ben’s boneless quivering, laying there on his bunk. He can feel Rey’s presence growing further away by the second.

“Do I _look_ like I know why?” Ben wails, covering his eyes with both hands. “She just— _does_ _shit_ when she wants to.--. ” He pauses. “Sorry.”

Luke neither pardons nor condemns tbe cursing, simply sits on the edge of the bed, puts a hand on Ben’s flank.

“There must’ve been a reason. She wouldn’t just run off like that.” _Some force must explain this rift in the stars._ The stability of the last few months, rented up the middle in seconds.

 

Medichlorians pump back and forth beneath his touch, frenzied.

“I—she—“ and then Ben Solo is uncorked, if not in a more physical sense.

“ _I can’t love her the way she wants me to_.” His face is pink and wet, little curls stuck to his cheek with the salt-stickiness of tears. He looks all of fifteen again, eyes squeezed shut against the world.

“Kriffing stars and stones, Ben, what’s—“

Mouths. Lips parted, dark red, hot and wet and wanton with ravenous _need_. Flesh, _Ben’s_ pale flesh, kneaded and nipped at as a way to mark, to forge some sort of map, scrawled in the dip of muscle and splotchy flush of his chest. Downy hair, dark, soft, leading to somewhere that’s dissolved by her panting breath before she can find the treasure hidden there. It’s the sweetest tease; she doesn’t know, but she _wants_ to, oh, so badly, wants to traverse the uncertainty and trembling eagerness that is this new and amazing sense. She never knew it was possible to feel this good, this struck—

 

Luke staggers against the post of Ben’s bunk, hand flying out to catch the lurch in his center of gravity.

_Oh._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just wanted to give another thank you to the people still supporting this fic. i'm writing it for y'all, at this point.   
> comments are much much welcome. that's what fuels this story (besides the aching need in in my chest for FLUUUUUFFFFF and soulbond feels that somehow persists despite myself). 
> 
> as always, come talk to me @floatin-on-bespin <3


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